Language and the Cognitive Construal of the World 9783110809305, 9783110143010

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Language and the Cognitive Construal of the World

W DE

G

Trends in Linguistics Studies and Monographs 82

Editor Werner Winter

Mouton de Gruyter Berlin · New York

Language and the Cognitive Construal of the World

edited by

John R. Taylor Robert E. MacLaury

Mouton de Gruyter Berlin · New York

1995

Mouton de Gruyter (formerly Mouton, The Hague) is a Division of Walter de Gruyter & Co., Berlin.

© Printed on acid-free paper which falls within the guidelines of the ANSI to ensure permanence and durability. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Language and the cognitive construal of the world / edited by John R. Taylor, Robert E. MacLaury. p. cm. - (Trends in linguistics. Studies and monographs ; 82) Chiefly papers presented at a conference entitled Language, thought, and culture which was held in Broederstroom, South Africa in 1991. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 3-11-014301-1 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Language and culture. 2. Cognitive grammar. 3. Categorization (Linguistics) I. Taylor, John R. II. MacLaury, Robert E., 1944. III. Series. P35.L29 1995 306.4'4-dc20 95-18973 CIP

Deutsche Bibliothek - Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Language and the cognitive construal of the world / ed. by John R. Taylor ; Robert E. MacLaury. — Berlin ; New York : Mouton de Gruyter, 1995 (Trends in linguistics : Studies and monographs ; 82) ISBN 3-11-014301-1 NE: Taylor, John R. [Hrsg.]; Trends in linguistics / Studies and monographs

© Copyright 1995 by Walter de Gruyter & Co., D-10785 Berlin All rights reserved, including those of translation into foreign languages. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Typesetting and printing: Arthur Collignon GmbH, Berlin. Binding: Lüderitz & Bauer GmbH, Berlin. Printed in Germany.

Contents Preface: Linguistic and anthropological approaches to cognition Robert E. MacLaury Introduction: On construing the world John R. Taylor

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Seeing it in more than one way Eugene H. Casad

23

Possession and possessive constructions Ronald W. Langacker

51

What lack needs to have: A study in the cognitive semantics of privation Savas L. Tsohatzidis

81

The construal of cause: The case of cause prepositions Rene Dirven

95

Conceptual grammaticalization and prediction Bernd Heine

119

Metaphors of anger in Japanese Keiko Matsuki

137

Looking back at anger: Cultural traditions and metaphorical patterns Dirk Geeraerts-Stefan Grondelaers

153

Anger: Its language, conceptualization, and physiology in the light of cross-cultural evidence Zoltan Kövecses 181 The metaphorical conception of mind: "Mental activity is manipulation" Olaf Jäkel

197

Vantage theory Robert E. MacLaury

231

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Contents

The terror of Montezuma: Aztec history, vantage theory, and the category of "person" Jane H. Hill-Rober t E. MacLaury 211 Selection of Japanese categories during social interaction Munekazu H. Aoyagi

331

Genus, species, and vantages Jeff Lansing

365

On construing the world of language Nigel Love

377

Index of names

391

Subject index

396

Contributors

407

Preface: Linguistic and anthropological approaches to cognition Robert E. MacLaury

Traditionally linguists and anthropologists together have sought to fathom the tie between language and cultural construction. Boas (1911) exquisitely documents the indispensability of categorization to language as well as the culture-specific content of categories particular to any language. His statement articulates a knowledge of the language-culture relation that had accrued from the systematic comparison of human societies since it began at least four centuries before him (Hodgen 1964). On Boas's empirical foundation, the intimate bond has been further illuminated from the perspectives afforded by Sapir's (1916) concern with timedepth, Kroeber's (1917) superorganic, Levi-Strauss's (1949) structuralism, the ethnoscientists' formalizing of cognitive models (Tyler 1969), and the arguments supporting universals (Berlin 1992, Brown 1991, Hardin 1995, Heine this volume). The following chapters foretell that the theoretical nexus of language, categorization, and culture will tighten even more and will yield yet another conceptual advance. Currently, cognitive linguistics, as it has grown out of Space Grammar under Langacker and others (1982, 1987, 1993; Lakoff 1987; Taylor 1989), recognizes not only that reliance on mental imagery and on the figure-ground construction is vital to language but that this practice is seemingly innate. In cognitive anthropology, vantage theory proposes nearly identical innate processes, but specifically in the construal of categories. Here the processes differ from noncategorical constructs in that grounds and figures are arranged as priorities of concentration and must include attention to similarity and attention to distinctiveness among them; the latter define categorization apart from other image schematic and figure-ground cognition. In agreement with the various kinds of perspectivization explored by Langacker and his colleagues, any category is a point of view based on the inborn human proclivity to make sense by formulating analogies with space-time as a source. Linguists (Bickerton 1992) and anthropologists (Falk 1992, Burling 1993) alike offer speculations on cognitive evolution, which at the very

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least lends metaphysical depth to our ideas about the relation of language and culture. They envision, at the onset of language, an intelligent, fully bipedal creature who shared a savannah with major carnivores, who lived by scavenging their kills, who had to plot their movements meticulously and constantly, and who was too small to fight them, too large to hide from them, and too slow to flee from them. On this prelinguistic horizon, natural selection favored more than sheer stealth and cunning but specifically the yen to manipulate multiple mental maps and alternative spacetime plans, and these logistical conceptions had to include not only one's own position but the purviews of all actors germane to one's survival, two-footed and four-footed; and selection not only favored this parallactic talent but, equally as vital, the drive to apply it incessantly such that reality would be at every moment construed as a mutable scheme from any of various viewing angles. Then, on the basis of a single analogy and likely with the booster of another mutation, hominids extended their capacity and attendant drive to the construction of plastic categories, thus putting in place the conjoint foundation for rudimentary language and culture. Certainly the advance from the Oldowan eolith to the Acheulean handax required premeditated imagery, mental rotation, and plotting of viewpoint in reference to both a fixed axis and the turning of a bifacial blade, all projected into an original blank of spherical stone. Yet, as this technology remained stable for the next million years, it certainly was not the development of lithic tools that impelled our ancestral brain to double its size while the oral cavity contracted and the pharynx deepened. Finally, only 30,000 years ago, homo sapiens emerged in the Upper Paleolithic with a cultural explosion of art and artifacts that rival the aesthetics of contemporary masterpieces. Cultural anthropologists have contributed virtually no hypotheses of instinct to the Human Genome Diversity Project, a proposal to map human chromosomes (Khan 1994). Kroeber, in formulating his superorganic, explained why it is unlikely that any sort of human behavior would be genetically determined (cf. Sperber 1980). However, if certain fundamental strategies of making sense - such asfigure-groundprojection and space-time analogy — are genetically foreordained, and if they enable all orders of flexible and revisable constructions on their bases, then the search for innate pattern beyond these fundamentals may not pay off. Conversely, genetic determination is likely to occur at the stem of language and culture, as the stem cannot be invented anew by every human group. Although a child may learn from its elders and peers that a particular word should name both blue and green, who teaches the child the

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method of composing this category? Perhaps it is more than coincidence that both cognitive linguistics and vantage theory, each with its separate emphasis, attribute innateness to the same sorts of process. As John Taylor describes, the chapters of this volume go a long distance toward covering the facets of construal. Yet certain companion pieces already in the literature add to the overview. Clark (1990) shows that children face the problem of mastering the particular points of view that are sanctioned by their first language. Each language features a different combination of conventional vantages. Yet the task before any child of commanding specific perspectives is an immense part of language-learning because, in general, the use of language consists largely of adopting, manipulating, and conveying one view after another. Although Clark's intent is to demonstrate how critical to language-acquisition is the learning of viewpoints, she incidentally imputes further claims of global scope: first, points of view are inseparable from language and constantly adopted as it is spoken; second, this part of language has been neglected by linguists, at least in proportion to its importance. To my knowledge there are no studies that, say, compare two or more languages to show how each countenances a different constellation of sentential vantages. Clark's suggestion seems to pertain to what rule-writing linguistic grammarians used to call "transformations," that is, rearrangements of one core of words to convey different slants on a single event in "deep structure." The notion of perspective may supersede this awkward way of expressing the relation between intringuingly similar sentences. Such an account of how arrangement relates to meaning may bring us closer to a comprehensive theory of language. The present gulf between autonomous syntax and cognitive linguistics is unlikely to last much longer. While the former has eschewed semantics, it can, nevertheless, address regularities that we in the cognitive camp have no way of modeling. Is the current Chomskian school really claiming that language names the world objectively? Or are they attributing to language particular processes other than those, such as figure-ground or metaphor, that cognitivists usually analyze? Like proponents of cognitive linguists or vantage theory, autonomous syntacticians attribute innateness to language, although they emphasize its systematic acquisition and the deftness by which utterances of amazing complexity are strung together and innovatively composed. This is quite apart from our own accounts of primordial imagery, primeval figure-ground, and the use of space-time analogy to form categories.

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The homo sapiens who deposited their elegant Upper Paleolithic artifacts likely commanded all of the myriad linguistic capacities studied by autonomous syntacticians, whereas our forebears in the Lower Paleolithic are less likely to have controlled all of these faculties. Homo habilis and homo erectus may have only built upon innate properties of conceptualization of the like that Langacker and I identify. Cognitive linguistics, cognitive anthropological vantage theory, and autonomous syntax may offer each other a natural division of labor, each dealing with a different part of language that emerged at a distinct epoch in accord with a separate mutation. Certainly a speaker of any contemporary language combines the entire endowment to construe any utterance; the construction of viewpoint may integrate it all. Yet the capacities are likely to differ in function, quality, and genetic basis, if only the layers of development could be experimentally isolated for analysis. Jackendoff (1991), like Langacker's disciples or myself, is limited by his point of departure; but unlike some among us, he conjectures the need to supersede his original framework. Cognitive linguistics and cognitive anthropology will advance substantially when more pioneers of this ilk work toward each other's positions from opposite directions. Most chapters of this auspicious collection result from the conference Language, Thought and Culture: A Cognitive Linguistic Perspective that John Taylor organized at Broederstroom, South Africa, in 1991 (see also Taylor 1992). Those by Hill and MacLaury, Aoyagi, Matsuki, and Lansing were presented at various symposia that I organized at conferences in 1989 and 1990 in Arizona (LSA), Washington DC (AAA), and California (SWAA). Versions of my "Vantage Theory" were delivered under both auspices. After I developed vantage theory as a model of color categorization (MacLaury 1986, 1987), the problem of applying it beyond this test domain seemed insurmountable. Yet before I arrived at the University of Arizona for a temporary appointment in 1988, Jane Hill had read my 1987 paper, and, with only this at hand, had prepared the first draft of our collaborative manuscript. Dr. Hill emphasized then that our paper proved cognitive anthropology to be as capable of contribution to discourse analysis as are the hermeneutic approaches of Bakhtin (1981; Hill and Hill 1987; Hill 1995) and others (e.g., Ricoeur 1978) that are widely acclaimed in anthropology. Keiko Matsuki and Munekazu Aoyagi prepared their papers in my seminars while Jeff Lansing joined us with the forerunner his at our LSA symposium. Matsuki analyzes Japanese anger to proffer a cross-cultural angle on Kövecses's work. Aoyagi employs vantage theory to achieve a step-by-step insider's account of socio-

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linguistic decision making, which Brown and Oilman (1960) had rendered algebraically in their prime overview of the same topic. Lansing finds parallels between vantage theory and Aristotle's thoughts on the nature of classification while showing how subsequent schools have successively modified the classical thinking beyond recognition. On the basis of scholarship, he counters a recent impulse to attribute the classical view of the category to Aristotle alone. Lansing underscores our need to know more about our predecessors, and he does so in the same spirit with which Geeraerts and Grondelaers draw attention to our naivety regarding the historical forces that have shaped our raw data. Elsewhere works of vantage theory are cultural and historical but nonlinguistic (e. g., M. McLaury 1989), which supports Langacker's key point that kinds of cognition critical to language may obtain as readily in other realms of thought. In sum, the chapters secured by John Taylor and the contributions from my associates fell together by opportune accident out of our meeting in South Africa, but the coherence of this collection arises from aligned thinking in related fields that was bound to coalesce in short time. References Bakhtin, Mihail M. 1981 The dialogic imagination. Austin: University of Texas Press. Berlin, Brent 1992 Ethnobiological classification: Principles of categorization of plants and animals in traditional societies. Princeton. Princeton University Press. Bickerton, Derek 1992 Language & species. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Boas, Franz (ed.) 1911 "Handbook of American Indian languages". Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin 40:\. Brown, Donald E. 1991 Human Universals. New York et al.: McGraw-Hill. Brown, Roger - Albert Oilman 1960 "The pronouns of power and solidarity", in: Thomas Sebeok (ed.), Style in Language. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 253—276. Burling, Robins 1993 "Primate calls, human language, and nonverbal communication". Current Anthropology 34:25-53. Clark, Eve V. 1990 "Speaker perspective in language acquisition". Journal of Linguistics 28:1201-1220. Falk, Dean 1992 Braindance. New York: Henry Holt and Company.

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Hardin, Clyde L. (ed.) 1995 Color Categories in Thought and Language. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press. Heine, Bernd [this volume] "Conceptual grammaticalization and prediction". Hill, Jane H. 1995 "The voices of Don Gabriel: Responsibility and self in a modern Mexicano [in press] narrative", in Bruce Mannheim and Dennis Tedlock (eds.), Dialogical Anthropology. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Hill, Jane H. - Kenneth C. Hill 1987 Speaking Mexicano: Dynamics of Syncretic Languages in Central Mexico. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Hodgen, Margaret T. 1964 Early Anthropology in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Jackendoff, Ray 1991 Semantic structures. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Kahn, Patricia 1994 "Genetic diversity project tries again". Science 266:720-22. Kroeber, Alfred L. 1917 "The superorganic". American Anthropologist 19:163-213. Lakoff, George 1987 Women, fire, and dangerous things: What categories reveal about the mind. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Langacker, Ronald W. 1982 "Space grammar, analysability, and the English passive". Language 58:22-80. 1987 Foundations of cognitive grammar. Vol. 1. Stanford: Stanford University Press. 1991 Foundations of cognitive grammar. Vol. 2. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Levi-Strauss, Claude 1949 The elementary structures of kinship. Boston: Beacon Press. MacLaury, Maria I. 1989 La Placita: Vantages of urban change in historic Tucson. Tucson: University of Arizona, College of Architecture, Master of Arts Thesis. Pp. 169. [Ann Arbor, MI: University Microfilms International, No. 1339280]. MacLaury, Robert E. 1986 Color in Mesoamerica, Vol. 1: A theory of composite categorization. Berkeley: University of California, Department of Anthropology, Doctoral Dissertation. Pp. 435. [Ann Arbor, MI: University Microfilms International, No. 8718073]. 1987 "Coextensive semantic ranges: Different names for distinct vantages of one category", in: Barbara Need, Eric Schiller, and Anna Bosch (eds.), Papers from the 23rd Annual Regional Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society, Part I: The General Session. Chicago: Chicago Linguistic Society, 268-282. Ricoeur, Paul 1978 "The task of hermeneutics", in: Michael Murry (ed.), Heidegger and modern philosophy. New Haven: Yale University Press.

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Sapir, Edward 1916 "Time perspective in aboriginal American culture: A study in method." Canada, Department of Mines, Geological Survey, Memoir 90 Anthropological Series 13. Ottawa: Government Printing Bureau. [Published 1963 in: David G. Mandelbaum (ed.), Selected writings of Edward Sapir in language, culture, and personality. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 389-462.] Sperber, Dan 1980 "Remarks on the lack of positive contributions from anthropologists on the problem of innateness", in: M. Piatelli-Palmarini (ed.), Language and learning: the debate between Jean Piaget and Noam Chomsky. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 244—249. Taylor, John R. 1989 Linguistic categorization: Prototypes in linguistic theory. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Taylor, John R. (ed.) 1992 "Language, thought, and culture". South African Journal of Linguistics 10(4). Tyler, Stephen A. (ed.) 1969 Cognitive anthropology. New York et al.: Hold, Rinehart and Winston.

Introduction: On construing the world John R. Taylor In his essay "How to Talk: Some Simple Ways",1 J. L. Austin invites us to imagine a simplified world, and a simplified language with which to talk about it. The "world" proposed in the essay consists of a finite set of discrete items, each bearing a unique name. Each item is assignable to one, and only one, of a finite set of types. The types could be, say, kinds of geometrical figures, while the items could be named by numerals. The syntax permits only sentences of the structure "I is a T", where / is the name of an item, and T is the name of a type. A possible sentence in the language might be 7227 is a rhombus. "How to Talk" is a curious piece, especially when viewed against Austin's oeuvre as a whole. Austin's genius lay in his sensitivity to "ordinary language", and his philosophical method consisted in elucidating the meanings of words and expressions by considering the kinds of circumstances in which they would ordinarily be used. His purpose, in so doing, was not to provide the "last word" on long-standing philosophical problems but rather to provide the "first word" (Austin 1979: 185). Any examination of a problem, Austin seems to be saying, needs to begin by examining the words which people use in stating, and talking about, the problem. In this way, conceptual confusions can be eliminated at the outset. One result of such an examination might be, for example, the discovery that what is being talked about is not a single, clear concept, but rather a family of related concepts. Now, the "language" that is described in "How to Talk" seems rather remote from ordinary language; the "world" described in the paper likewise bears little relation, it would seem, to the world which human beings inhabit. It comes as a surprise, therefore, when Austin, the "ordinary language philosopher", states that his purpose in the essay is to "elucidate some of our ordinary thought and language about the use of speech" (1979: 132). Equally curious, the reader may be thinking, is the fact that I have chosen to introduce a volume entitled Language and the Construal of the World by mentioning this strange essay, devoted to a "language" radically removed from "ordinary language", used of a "world" which is a parody of the "real world".

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The clue to my intention may be found in a little phrase that Austin smuggles into an introductory paragraph. Austin says that we possibly never are actually in a situation exactly like the one described in his paper, although "more probably we sometimes are so, or, more correctly, regard ourselves for current intents and purposes as being so" (1979: 134; emphasis added). In certain circumstances, then, we may indeed talk as //the model in "How to Talk" applied. What might these circumstances be? At the risk, perhaps, of reading into Austin's work an interpretation which he did not intend to put there, I would suggest that the circumstances are those presumed to hold in model-theoretic, or truth-conditional, approaches to semantics. A statement to the effect that "Snow is white"—a statement which is said to be "true" only when the stuff referred to by the word snow happens to exhibit the property denoted by the expression is white—\s of the same order as a statement to the effect that "1227 is a rhombus"—where 7227 denotes a uniquely identifiable entity in "the world", is a constitutes an "assertive link", and rhombus denotes one of a finite number of types existing "in the world". The rub, of course, is that, as Austin says, we only "regard ourselves", "for current intents and purposes", as being in a situation characterized in the manner described in "How to Talk".2 Once these special "intents and purposes" are put aside, it is clear that the "real world" is radically different from the world described in "How to Talk"—not just quantitatively different, in the sense that the real world contains many more items, and many more types, than Austin's model world-but qualitatively different, too. Take a trivial example. Suppose I ask: How many "items" are there on my writing desk at the moment? Well, amongst many other things, there is a box of matches. Does this count as one "item" or two "items" (the tray plus the outer box), or three "items" (the whole and its two parts)? What about the matches inside, or the word LION printed on the match box? Is this word an additional item, or four additional items (i.e., the four letters of the word), or five items (the word plus the constituent letters)? Etcetera, etcetera. The point is, the number of "items", even within such a circumscribed portion of the world as the top of my writing desk, can only be indefinite (cf. Putnam 1988). The same goes for the number of "types" to which these items are to be assigned. How many "types" would a Japanese speaker, or a nonJapanese speaker, want to identify in a page of Japanese script? It is evident that what we identify as "items", and as "types" to which the items are assigned, are functions of our interests, concerns, previous knowledge, etc.-in a word, they are functions of our cognition.

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Here we can take our cue, once again, from Austin. Let us look more closely at the word world. Austin spoke of the "trailing clouds of etymology": [A] word never—well, hardly ever—shakes off its etymology and its formation. In spite of all changes in and extensions of and additions to its meanings, and indeed rather pervading and governing these, there will still persist the old idea. (Austin 1979: 201)

In view of its relevance to the concerns of present-day cognitive semantics (and to the topics of the papers in this book), I cannot resist citing the continuation of the above passage: Going back into the history of a word, very often into Latin, we come back pretty commonly to pictures or models of how things happen or are done. ... We take some very simple action, like shoving a stone, usually as done by and viewed by oneself, and use this, with the features distinguishable in it, as our model in terms of which to talk about other actions and events: and we continue to do so, scarcely realizing it, even when these other actions are pretty remote and perhaps much more interesting to us in their own right than the acts originally used in constructing the model ever were, and even when the model is really distorting the facts rather than helping us to observe them.... "Causing", I suppose, was a notion taken from a man's own experience of doing simple actions, and by primitive man every event was construed in terms of this model: every event has a cause, that is, every event is an action done by somebody-if not by a man, then by a quasi man, a spirit. When, later, events which are not actions are realized to be such, we still say that they must be "caused", and the word snares us: we are struggling to ascribe to it a new, unanthropomorphic meaning, yet constantly, in searching for its analysis, we unearth and incorporate the lineaments of the ancient model. ... Examining such a word historically, we may well find that it has been extended to cases that have by now too tenuous a relation to the model case, that it is a cause of confusion and superstition. (Austin 1979: 202-203)

To return, then, to the word world. What of its etymology? Old English weorold, or worold, is a compound formation, from Germanic *weraz 'man' (cf. Latin vir) and aid 'age, life-span'. In origin, then, world was the "age of a man", "human life", and the circumstances of a life (Lewis 1967: 214-16). Modern uses of the word have retained the subjective, anthropomorphic perspective. In speaking of my world, the world of a child, the world of Walt Disney, I mean by these expressions not some objectively existing set of circumstances, but a subjective reality, i. e., a set of experiences, impressions, or creations of the imagination. I would even suggest that the very adaptability of the word in linguistic semantics-witness the phrase"possible world"-is itself testimony to the word's inherent subjectivity.

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In brief, then, the "world" is not something objectively given, it is something "construed" by human cognition. It is "construals of the world" that are properly regarded as the object of linguistic semantics. Jackendoff expressed this view as follows: We must take issue with the naive position that the information conveyed by language is about the real world. We have conscious access only to the projected world-the world as unconsciously organized by the mind; and we can talk about things only insofar as they have achieved mental representation through these processes of organization. Hence the information conveyed by language must be about the projected world. (Jackendoff 1983: 29; author's emphasis).

In contrast to Jackendoff's notion of "projected world", the notion of "construal" implies a more active role of the language user in organizing and structuring his or her world. The term is taken from Langacker (1987: 487^488), who defines it as "the relationship between a speaker (or hearer) and a situation that he conceptualizes and portrays". There are several aspects to the construal relationship, as understood by Langacker: i. Firstly, and rather obviously, a speaker may vary the detail, or specificity, with which a scene is portrayed. We can describe an object as being "red", or, with greater specificity, "bright red", or "pinkish red"; or, less specifically, simply as "colored". We can say of a person that he is "running", or, characterizing his activity more precisely, that he is "jogging", or "sprinting". And, of course, a vast number of components of a scene are simply ignored in our linguistic accounts of it. ii. Related to specificity is the degree of precision with which a situation is characterized. I may say, without intent to deceive, that it is now half past twelve-although, if pressed, I would have to admit that it is not exactly half past twelve, but, say, twelve thirty-three. Lakoff (1972) and Kay (1983) have studied the phenomenon of "loose speaking", as did, of course, Austin, in chapter 11 of How To Do Things With Words. iii. The use of a linguistic form may evoke certain background assumptions. In describing a person as a "bachelor" (or "spinster"), I convey more than just the fact that the designated person is an adult male (or female) who has never married. The words invoke a "theory" (what Lakoff 1987 calls an ICM, or "idealized cognitive model") of "bachelorhood", or "spinsterhood". The model contains such components as the notion of a "marriageable age", and "explanations" of

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why it is that a person passes the marriageable age without marrying (Taylor 1989: 97). iv. The use of certain linguistic expressions may suggest a construal of a situation in terms of something else. Nonliteral expressions (metaphor, metonymy) are, of course, prime examples of this phenomenon. To say that a person "exploded with anger" is to convey, not just that the person was very angry, but also presupposes a conceptualization of anger in terms of a pressurized fluid inside a container. But the borderline between the "metaphorical" and the "literal" is fuzzy. Even the choice of a grammatical construction can impose a construal in terms of something else. A nominalization, such as the crossing of the river by the two men, differs from the two men crossed the river to the extent that in the former case the event is presented as an atemporal "thing", in the latter case as a temporal "process". v. Finally, all linguistic coding incorporates perspective, where "perspective" is being used in a rather broad sense, to cover a number of related notions, such as figure/ground organization, deixis, and viewpoint. Necessarily, in any construal of a scene, certain components are foregrounded whilst others serve as reference points for the characterization of the foreground. The picture above the sofa and the sofa below the picture could well be truth-conditionally equivalent. The difference is that the first expression locates the picture (figure) with reference to the sofa (ground), while in the second expression the relations are reversed. Deixis is a familiar notion, having to do with the presentation of a scene from the location of an observer, usually, but not necessarily, the speaker. Finally, the notion of "viewpoint" may be defined as the "mental route" that a speaker takes in presenting a scene. The sentence pair The roof slopes steeply upward and The roof slopes steeply downward (Langacker 1990: 157) illustrates the phenomenon. In the first case, it is as if the speaker scans the scene from the bottom of the roof upwards, while in the second he scans from the top downwards. Another example of the same phenomenon is that I can designate one and the same person as John's wife, Jill's daughter, Jeff's mother, and so on. In each case, I designate the person via some other person, who bears a salient relation to the designated person. This last example also shows that the very choice of "type" ("wife", "daughter", "mother") to which an "item" is assigned-i.e., the way in which an entity is categorized-testifies to a certain perspective on the part of the speaker.

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The above by no means exhaust the notion of "construal". (Even from the few examples that have been given, however, it will be clear that the "same" situation may be construed in many different ways, in an indefinite number of different ways, in fact.) Some further aspects of the phenomenon, and the kinds of issues it raises, will be the topics of the papers in this book. While focusing on different aspects of the construal relation, all the papers have this in common: each rejects the "objectivist" picture of language and the world described (parodied?) in Austin's "How to Talk", by showing how "objective" situations are mediated by the speaker's cognitive processing. Casad, basing himself closely on Langacker's work, offers a detailed exemplification of the notion of construal. Casad makes several crosslanguage comparisons which strikingly document how one and the same state of affairs may be construed very differently in different languages. Cross-language differences are touched upon in several papers (Langacker, Dirven, Matsuki). In this connection, Casad draws attention to the conventionality of linguistic resources. Casad is therefore reluctant to equate "semantics" with "conceptualization" tout court. (Such would seem to be the position of Jackendoff 1983: 17, for whom "semantic structures" constitute a subset of "conceptual structures".) Admittedly, Casad does not make a semantic versus conceptual split, as does Bierwisch (e.g., Bierwisch 1981). Casad emphasizes, however, that not every, or any, conceptualization has the status of the meaning of a linguistic expression. Rather, conceptualizations need to be "shaped", or "structured", so as to permit symbolization by the resources made available by a given language. Such a notion, while clearly "Whorfian" in spirit, does not entail that conceptualization is determined by language, since the symbolic resources of a language do not constitute a fixed inventory. On the contrary, speakers can, and do, exercise considerable creativity in extending and adapting the symbolic potential of their language. Langacker deals with the semantics of possessive constructions in English, and some other languages. In spite of the name traditionally given to these constructions, it is evident that possessive constructions may be used to denote a very large number of semantic relations, in addition to a relation of "possession", narrowly understood in the sense of legal ownership. Alongside John's car, we have the dog's tail, the girl's uncle, the plane's departure, and Kennedy's assassination. It has even been suggested that the possessive relation can be "any relation at all" (Williams 1982: 283). Yet there are clearly constraints on the relation between possessor and possessed. Symptomatic is the fact that the nominals in a

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possessive expression may not ordinarily be reversed. We have the relation of a whole to a part (the dog's tail), but not the relation of a part to the whole (Ithe tail's dog), we have the relation of a participant to an event (the plane's departure), but not the relation of an event to a participant (*the departure's plane). The essential point, Langacker maintains, is that the possessor must be construable as a "reference point entity". This notion encapsulates the insight that in order to conceptualize (or "establish mental contact with") an entity x, we frequently, or typically, need first to conceptualize an entity y; y serves as a "landmark" on the mental path we need to trace in order to "locate" entity x. We do not ordinarily think of, or encounter, detached tails. A tail is a part of an animal, and is generally thought of as such. It is normal, therefore, that in referring to a "tail", we do so via reference to the animal of which the tail is a part. Animals, in contrast, are "conceptually autonomous" entities, in the sense that we can conceptualize an animal without making necessary reference to any other kind of entity. We certainly do not (normally) have to first establish mental contact with a tail, in order then to refer to the animal of which the tail is a part. The notion of reference point is inherently subjective, and anthropocentric. It invokes the mental path taken by a human mind in conceptualizing a given entity. And if human beings had been created differently if we were of Lilliputian dimensions, say, or disembodied spirits-the range of potential reference points would no doubt also be very different! Tsohatzidis shows how examination of a single word—the English verb lack-can validate a number of points that have been made so far. Tsohatzidis argues that a statement to the effect that "x lacks y" not only conveys the fact that "x does not have y", the statement also communicates the presupposition that x may be categorized as a peripheral, or untypical member of a category C. The peripheral status of x in C rests, precisely, on the fact that x does not "have" the property, attribute, possession, etc. denoted by y, in contrast to the central, or prototypical members of C, which do have this property, attribute, etc. The central point that Tsohatzidis makes is that the membership of x in C is not something that is independently, or antecedently, given; there is, as he puts it, no "Great Book" in which the allocation of entities to types has been fixed for all times and for all purposes. Categorization is inherently unstable and context-dependent; it is a product, namely, of how a speaker, in harmony with his present concerns and the direction of his present thoughts, chooses to construe a certain state of affairs.

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Dirven addresses the concept of "cause". Now, it is traditional, in linguistic semantics, to treat cause as a unitary concept, an undifferentiated semantic primitive, that is incorporated into the meanings of many predicates. True, Miller and Johnson-Laird (1976: 489) recognize that cause is "an extremely complex concept"; they even go some way towards explicating people's conceptions of causal relations. Even so, they still persist in treating cause, along with other notions like "act" and "do", as semantic primitives—or if not as primitives, then as functors of constant semantic value. (Jackendoff 1991 proceeds no differently.) Consider, for example, Miller and Johnson-Laird's definitions, or decompositions, of the verbs permit (1976: 511) and eat (1976. 518): PERMIT (x, y, z): Someone χ "permits" someone y to do ζ if: (i) ACT(X, S) (ii) PERMISSIBLE (y, OO(y, z)) (iii) CAUSE (S, (ii)) EAT (x, y): An animate χ "eats" something y if there is a z such that z is the mouth of x and: (i) ACT(X, S) (ii) CAUSE(S, (INTO (THROUGH (TRAVEL))))(J, z, x)

Note that the proposed definitions entail that permit and eat incorporate semantic components which are exactly the same, viz. "act" and "cause", even though few people, I imagine, would see much commonality between an "act" of permitting, and an "act" of eating. Casad fails to be convinced by Jackendoff's (1983) claim that butter the bread and it's raining both incorporate the notion "go". So, too, we might wonder whether / ate a sandwich really means anything at all like "I acted in such a manner that my action caused a sandwich to travel through my mouth into me". In brief, the above definitions manifestly fail to capture the many-faceted nuances of the concepts "permit" and "eat". The topic of Dirven's chapter is the expression of causal relations by the English prepositions. His study leads him to conclude that what we loosely call "cause" in fact comprises a family of distinct cause concepts. (Austin was making a similar point in the passage cited earlier.) Furthermore, there may not be a single, overarching concept of cause encoded in English (or at least, not by the prepositions). Comparisons between English and two languages closely related to English, viz. Dutch and German, lead to some further conclusions, namely, that even these closely related languages do not share the same cause concepts, and that the "same" objective situation may be construed in terms of different cause

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concepts in the different languages. It may even happen that a situation that in one language is construed in terms of cause, may be construed in another language in terms of a noncausal relation. There is, of course, a much wider issue at stake here, namely the degree to which syntax, i. e., the form of complex expressions, is in general motivated by semantics. Actually, in the debate between those who claim that syntax is semantically motivated, and those who claim that syntax is essentially arbitrary, it has to be admitted that the playing field is by no means level. Proponents of the arbitrariness position apparently feel that they need do no more than cite a syntactic fact, declare that there is no semantic or conceptual reason why the fact should be as it is, and so rest their case. Such claims are remarkably frequent in the literature. To cite but one example, taken from a book selected at random from my bookshelf, Matthei and Roeper, in their introduction to psycholinguistics, state that "there is nothing about the meaning of the verb sleep that would lead us to predict that the sentence *John slept the bed is ungrammatical. It is simply an idiosyncratic fact about the verb sleep in English that it is intransitive and does not appear with a direct object" (1983: 178). I have not cited this example in order to claim that Matthei and Roeper are wrong. They might well be right. But to legitimize this conclusion, one would first have to make some serious attempts to come up with a semantic explanation of the phenomenon in question. (The work of Wierzbicka [especially Wierzbicka 1988] is an outstanding example of how many apparent idiosyncrasies in syntax are, on careful examination, subject to semantic explanations.) Only if such attempts manifestly fail is it justified to say that the intransitive status of sleep is "an idiosyncratic fact" about the verb. Dirven's chapter shows how detailed semantic analysis can counter the widely held belief that preposition selection is essentially arbitrary, and of little semantic significance. But Dirven is concerned not just to motivate preposition selection, he also wishes to derive from the evidence of linguistic usage insights into the nature of the concept(s) of cause. It is an enterprise with which Austin would certainly have been sympathetic. Austin's method of enquiry, he notes somewhat disarmingly, is motivated by a "superstition", namely, that "the forms of words and expressions are highly significant for their meaning" (Austin 1979: 281). Present-day linguists may quibble over some of Austin's semantic analyses. (For these, the reader is referred to Austin's essays.) But Austin's point was simply that if we are to talk about "cause", or whatever, we need first to ascertain what we are talking about. And the linguistic evidence, Dirven suggests, indicates that "cause" covers a large number of different concepts.

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Heine also deals with the compositional motivation of complex expressions. Specifically, he addresses the diachronic origins of orientational expressions in African and Oceanic languages. By assembling data from a large number of languages, he is able to arrive at conclusions which would not be available from the examination of a single language. His data show a very strong trend for certain body-part terms, such as words for "head", "face", or "buttocks", to be pressed into service to denote such spatial notions as "top'V'on top of, "front'7'in front of, "bottom'V'underneath". The motivation for these semantic extensions, clearly, is a universal tendency for human beings to construe nonhuman entities in terms of the model provided by the human body, or, in some cases, an animal body. Heine also raises the possibility that environmental factors may be relevant to the use of animal body-part terms. It is predominantly the languages of nomadic peoples—for whom animal husbandry is a central activity-which tend to employ a "zoomorphic" rather than a "human" model for the derivation of orientational terms, as revealed by the extension of "back" to denote, not "behind", but "on". Three papers, by Kövecses, Matsuki, and Geeraerts and Grondelaers, deal with emotions, specifically, with the emotion of anger. Like cause, emotion (or more exactly, the possibility of talk about emotions) raises old philosophical problems. The central issue is the "problem of other minds". I may presume to know the emotional state that I am in (by definition, almost, one might say), but I have no direct acquaintance with another person's emotions. How then do I know that when other people talk about "anger", they are referring to the same kind of emotion that I am referring to by the word anger! Indeed, one can even ask, how do I know that other people have emotions at all? And yet, we need to assume that people do have emotions, and do mean more or less the same thing by psychological predicates, otherwise there could be no basis for the learning of these words, or for judging that the learner has successfully acquired the words. I would like to mention just two solutions to this conundrum that have been put forward in the philosophical literature. First, let us turn, once again, to Austin. In his essay "Other minds", Austin claims that "to be angry" is not just to be in a certain emotional state. Anger involves a whole "pattern of events"—what we would nowadays, following Schank and Abelson (1977), call a "script". It seems fair to say that "being angry" is in many respects like "having mumps". It is a description of a whole pattern of events, including occasion,

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symptoms, feeling and manifestation, and possibly other factors besides. It is as silly to ask "What, really, is the anger itselfl" as to attempt to fine down "the disease" to some one chosen item ("the functional disorder"). That the man himself feels something which we don't (in the sense that he feels angry and we don't) is, in the absence of ... telepathy, evident enough, and incidentally nothing to complain about as a "predicament": but there is no call to say that "that" ("the feeling") is the anger. (Austin 1979: 109)

Just as, say, the "restaurant script" evokes the series of events which typically occur in going to a restaurent, so the "anger script" activates knowledge of the sequence of events associated with anger (such as provocation, desire for retribution, attempts at suppression, acts of retribution, return of equilibrium; see Kövecses 1986). Knowledge of the script makes it possible for a person to assign "default values" to unobserved episodes. Thus, by observing certain outward signs, a person can infer the entire pattern of events, including the mental state of the angry person: [I]t is our confidence in the general pattern that makes us apt to say we "know" another man is angry when we have only observed parts of the pattern: for the parts of the pattern are related to each other very much more intimately than, for example, newspapermen scurrying in Brighton are related to a fire in Fleet Street. (Austin 1979: 109-110)

Austin concedes that a person who has never himself experienced the script, i.e., has never been angry, is unlikely to be able to recognize the scenario (1979: 104). The script must therefore be learned from experience. But in this respect, recognizing that a person is angry is in principle no different from recognizing that there's a bittern at the bottom of the garden-both activities presuppose that I have "learned to recognize or tell" bitterns (or, as the case may be, anger) (1979: 80). For the second treatment of the "problem of other minds", let us turn to Fodor (1981). According to Fodor, we attribute psychological states to a person in much the same way that a physicist infers the path of a charged particle from the observation of tracks in a cloud chamber. The physicist does not see the moving particle, no more than I experience another person's psychological state. Neither has the physicist defined the path of a particle in terms of the track it leaves, such that observation of the track is a criterion for the presence of a moving particle (particles do not have to leave tracks as they move). Likewise, pace Wittgenstein, we do not define psychological states in terms of their behavioral manifestations (whereby a verbal report of the psychological state might also count as a "behavioral manifestation"). Nor, Fodor argues, does the

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physicist infer the movement of a particle on the basis of a presumed correlation between observed tracks and movements of particles. For to suppose such a correlation requires prior knowledge of the particles' movement-the very point that is at issue. By the same token, we cannot attribute mental states to a person in virtue of a correlation between overt behavior and the inner state, since in the absence of prior access to other people's inner states, we have no basis on which to validate the correlation in the first place. Rather, the physicist infers the movement of the particle on the basis of a scientific theory, i.e., in terms of the "simplicity, plausibility, and predictive adequacy of an explanatory system as a whole" (Fodor 1981: 56). In much the same way, Fodor argues, we attribute psychological states to a person on the basis of a theory (or theories) of psychological states: Much everyday conceptualization depends on the exploitation of theories and explanatory models in terms of which experience is integrated and understood. Such pre-scientific theories, far from being mere functionless "pictures," play an essential role in determining the sorts of perceptual and inductive expectations we form and the kind of arguments and explanations we accept. (Fodor 1981: 62)

To say, then, that a person "is angry" is to make a "theoretical inference" from observed behavior (including verbal reports) to "underlying mental occurrences" (1981: 61). The papers by Austin and Fodor are highly programmatic in nature. Austin, for example, makes only schematic reference to the actual contents of the anger script. Fodor does not offer us even the outline of a "conceptual theory"; he merely states that people have such theories. A further point seems relevant. Austin appears to take it for granted that two people, each experiencing anger, will construct on the basis of their experiences the very same script. Likewise, Fodor seems to assume that the theories that people have of psychological states are, if not identical, then at least commensurate. The possibility exists, however, that different people, or groups of people speaking different languages, or people belonging to different cultural traditions, or people living in different historical epochs, may actually turn out to have rather different "theories" about their emotions. Theories of anger are the subject of the three papers in this book. In previous publications, Kövecses examined the expressions that American English speakers use in talking about anger, and other emotions (e.g. Kövecses 1986, 1990). Many of these are clearly metaphorical in nature

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(/ was boiling, He exploded, She was seething with rage, etc.). Drawing on the methodology of Lakoff and Johnson (1980), Kövecses related these metaphorical expressions to a small number of underlying "conceptual metaphors". Prominent amongst these is the conceptualization of the body as a "container" for the emotions, and the conceptualization of anger, specifically, as the heat of a fluid in a container (i.e., the body). Significantly, the "logic" inherent in this construal of anger makes it possible to elaborate an "anger script", i. e., a prescription, not only of sequential stages of anger, but of possible courses of action that an angry person can take. Increasing the heat of a liquid in a closed container causes an increase in pressure inside the container. Unless the pressure is released, or otherwise reduced, the container will explode. To prevent the inevitable "explosion", the angry person needs to "cool it", or "simmer down"; he must "let off steam", or "release" his anger in some other way (e. g., through an act of retribution), after which the initial state of equilibrium is regained. Arguably, the anger is heat metaphor has a physiological base. There is, namely, evidence that anger does cause a slight (actually, a very slight) increase in body temperature (Ekman-Levenson-Friesen 1983). This grounding of the metaphor in a physiological process could be the reason why so many different cultures employ (variants of) the anger is heat metaphor. Matsuki documents the presence of this metaphor in Japanese. Her data, however, testify to an additional, and language-specific theory of anger, one which, again, displays a remarkable internal logic, tiara, the stomach and bowel area, is the source of anger, whereby hara can stand metonymically for the emotion itself. As anger increases, hara rises up to the chest/heart region mune, the location of nausea. Finally, anger rises to the head region atama, the seat of rationality. According to the logic of this schema, the angry person goes through a stage of inner conflict and frustration (typified as "nausea"), during which the person still retains rational control over his actions, to a final stage of irrational behavior, when anger has taken over the centre of rationality. Geeraerts and Grondelaers propose a radical reanalysis of Kövecses's original data. They argue that the heat and fluid metaphors in English could well be reflexes of a highly elaborated theory of emotion, one that held sway over popular and scholarly thought in the West for over 2000 years, namely, the theory of the four humors. As Geeraerts and Grondelaers document, this now discarded and largely forgotten theory was not only the basis of premodern medical practice, it was integrated into a

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whole cosmology, with the establishment of correspondences between the humors and such diverse domains as the plant and animal kingdoms, dietary practices, the seasons, and the planets. Thus it was that "choleric" persons, i.e., persons prone to anger, were recommended to eliminate garlic and ginger from their diet. Anger, or a proclivity to anger, was believed to be caused by excess of yellow bile (or "choler") in the body. Choler was taken to be a warm and wet substance. This characterization of choler, according to Geeraerts and Grondelaers, is sufficient to explain the dominance of the hot liquid metaphors in discourse about anger. (The role of blood, more specifically, hot blood, is due to the belief that the humors circulated in the body as admixtures of blood.) With the general demise of the humor theory, a number of things could, and (according to Geeraerts and Grondelaers) did happen: i. Some expressions, which obviously and explicitly invoke the theory (such as stir one's bile), have begun to fall into disuse. ii. Other expressions have been reinterpreted, possibly in terms of the heat in a container metaphor documented by Kövecses. Thus, my blood is boiling (probably) no longer invokes the humor theory, as it once may have done. iii. "Reinterpretation" may involve the metaphorical construal of expressions that once may have been understood quite literally. In terms of the humor theory, a choleric person was quite literally hot-blooded. iv. Yet other expressions might persist, as quaint, uninterpretable relics of intellectual history. Such, for example, is the status of the belief, still current, perhaps, that masturbation can cause blindness. The more general, methodological point that Geeraerts and Grondelaers make is that theories, being cultural phenomena, are the product of historical processes. Kövecses counters by pointing to the ubiquity of the hot liquid metaphor, not only in languages influenced by classical antiquity and mainstream European thought, but also in Chinese and Japanese. Kövecses also raises the question whether the humor theory itself may not be grounded in the very same range of physiological experiences as the hot liquid metaphor. Such a supposition would mean that an expression like my blood is boiling, at least in earlier centuries, was multiply motivated-by physiological experience, and by the explicit, expert theory of the humors. The topic for further research, as Geeraerts and Grondelaers note, is to trace the origins of the humor theory itself, and its for-

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tunes in popular, as well as in official culture, in the West, from ancient Greek up to modern times. At least in Western culture, emotionality is commonly opposed to rationality. Thus we have the well-known dichotomies of feeling and thinking, the heart and the head. If the papers by Kövecses, Matsuki, and Geeraerts and Grondelaers deal with the conceptualization of emotions, Jäkel addresses the construal of mental processes themeslves. Using the technique popularized by Lakoff and Johnson (1980), Jäkel examines a broad range of everyday English expressions that have as their subject matter various mental activities and attributes: intelligence, understanding, thinking, problem solving, remembering, and so on. Lakoff and Johnson had identified the vision metaphor as the dominant metaphor of cognition: understanding is seeing. Jäkel's detailed investigation suggests that the vision metaphor may in fact be rather peripheral. He perceives in everyday talk of mental processes and attributes another metaphor, or cluster of metaphors, suggesive of a rather elaborate folk theory of the mind. The dominant metaphors construe the mind as a workshop-a place in which ideas are objects, where thought is the manipulation of objects, where intelligence is the sharpness of the tool used to process the objects, memory is a storehold for objects, remembering is retrieving objects from the storehold for use in the workship, and so on. Professional psychologists and cognitive scientists, of course, have their own metaphors, drawn predominantly from computer science. The brain is construed as computer hardware, the mind as computer software, and thinking is the running of the software program on the hardware. (For a presentation, and radical critique of this metaphor, see Searle 1992, especially chapter 9). Jäkel discovered a much more "homely" metaphor, or cluster of metaphors, underlying our talk of the mind. Moreover, taking a glance at some other languages, both European and nonEuropean, he surmises that the mind as a workshop metaphor enjoys considerable cross-linguistic, and cross-cultural validity. Looking into the etymology of some cognitive predicates in the modern languages, he further suggests that the mind as a workshop metaphor was dominant in earlier times, too. Lakoff and Johnson (1980) had noted that metaphors are not always fully coherent, that is to say, it is not always the case that every component of the source domain can be projected onto some aspect of the target domain. Take, for example, the rather general spatial metaphor, according to which we construe the future as being in front of us, and the past as being behind us. In one important respect, the metaphor is at

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odds with our experience of time, in that we can see what is (literally) in front of us, but we cannot (metaphorically) see what is in the future. No doubt, in this case, the discrepancy between the logic of the source and target domains is so crass that no speaker who employs the metaphor is likely to be misled by it. But consider some entailments of the workshop metaphor. If the mind is a workshop, and ideas are objects that are processed in the workshop, what corresponds to the workman in the workshop? Who is it that wields the tool ("intelligence") to shape the object ("ideas")? Who places the objects in the storeroom ("memory"), and retrieves them at a later date? If we take the workshop metaphor too seriously (one feels tempted to say: if we take the metaphor too literally), one has to postulate a homunculus in the mind/workshop who performs all these various activities. The computational metaphor of mind raises the same question, of course: If the brain is a digital computer, who is the user? (Searle 1992: 214). Perhaps the "homunculus fallacy" (Searle 1992: 212) crops up at so many turns precisely because of the prevalence of the workshop metaphor, and because the metaphor has indeed been taken "literally"? MacLaury presents a succinct account of a sophisticated and elaborated theory of construal, which he has named "vantage theory". Vantage theory developed out of MacLaury's work on color categorization. Color terminology has long held a privileged position in semantic research, for a number of reasons. In the first place, the physical properties of a color stimulus are amenable to precise, quantifiable description. In contrast with many other domains of experience, therefore, it is possible to obtain precise correlations between an "objective" property, and the name which a person attaches to it. Three other factors have contributed to the attractiveness, to linguists, psychologists, and anthropologists alike, of color research: i. The color spectrum is continuous. ii. Languages differ in their categorization of the spectrum. iii. The neurological processing of color stimuli in the retina and optical nerve is fairly well understood. In particular, there are good reasons to suppose that the human visual system is predisposed to perceive a set of "pure colors", the so-called "unique hues". Factors (i) and (ii), taken together, used to be cited as evidence for the Saussurian doctrine of the arbitrariness of the linguistic sign. How a person divides up the color spectrum-how many color categories he recog-

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nizes-was said to be determined by the color categories conventionally, and arbitrarily, made available by his language. The arbitrariness thesis is in conflict with (iii), i. e., with the fact that the human visual system is predisposed to recognize a number of focal points on the spectrum, i. e., "pure red", "pure green", and so on. Berlin and Kay's (1969) thesis that the languages of world follow the very same path in differentiating up to eleven basic colors, only partially resolves the conflict. For if every person with normal vision "sees" the very same focal colors, why do speakers of different languages not categorize the color spectrum in exactly the same way? MacLaury's answer invokes a further factor in color categorization, over and above properties of the stimulus and properties of the visual system, namely cognition. Categorizing a stimulus involves "placing" the stimulus with respect to a cognitive reference point. In so doing, a person can attend primarily to the similarity between the stimulus and the reference point, or to the distinctiveness of the stimulus vis-ä-vis the reference point. Attention to distinctiveness may result in the creation of a new reference point, which itself serves as the locus of judgements of similarity or distinctiveness. In terms of color categorization, the reference points are, primarily, the unique hues. Maximum attendance to similarity divides the spectrum into only two broad categories, the "warm" colors, and the "cool" colors. Increased attendance to distinctiveness gives rise to a progressive differentiation of the color spectrum, essentially along the lines hypothesized by Berlin and Kay. MacLaury speculates that attention to distinctiveness may correlate with technological complexities, with rapid social change, as well as with extreme hardship in eking out an existence. The interplay between attention to similarity and attention to distinctiveness is nicely illustrated on the example of "coextensive" color terms where a person uses two terms to name the members of a single color category. The two terms are not obviously in contrast, nor are they strict synonyms. One of the terms-typically, the older and better established one in the language-tends to have its focus in the center of the category. Colors are named by this term to the extent that the speaker attends to similarity. MacLaury refers to this as the "dominant" term. The other term-typically, a more recent innovation in the language-tends to be focused at the periphery of the category. This "recessive" term testifies to the speaker's attendance to distinctiveness within that portion of the spectrum. Typically, only a restricted segment of the category is named by this term. However, if pressed, speakers are prepared to extend the

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recessive term to encompass more and more of the items named by the dominant term. The spatial metaphors in the above account are not fortuitous. MacLaury draws extensive analogies between color categorization and the tracking of location in space. We typically give the spatial location of a moving object vis-ä-vis a fixed reference object. The reference object constitutes a "fixed coordinate", whereas the located object constitutes the "mobile coordinate". But the located object itself may come to serve as a reference point for the location of a further entity, and so on. This same mechanism, MacLaury suggests, underlies the very process of categorization, and in the second part of his paper he suggests some applications of vantage theory outside the domain of color. Vantage theory turns out to offer an insightful account of some otherwise highly puzzling phenomena. For example, similarity, for the logician, is a symmetrical relation; if A resembles B, then B resembles A. It would be incoherent to say that A resembles B "more", or "less", than B resembles A. Yet precisely such an asymmetry holds in the case of degrees of perceived resemblance between a peripheral and a central member of a category. With respect to the category of birds, for example, a duck is reckoned to be more similar to a robin than a robin is to a duck. This asymmetry is predicted by vantage theory. With the central member as reference point, attention to similarity causes the perceived size of the category to contract. With a more peripheral member as reference point, attention is on differences, causing the perceived distance between members to expand. Three further papers exemplify applications of vantage theory. Hill and MacLaury trace in Aztec accounts of the Spanish conquest the emergence of a distinctiveness vantage in the representation of Aztec rulers. Montezuma, the defeated ruler, is represented not in terms of stereotypical speech and external behavior, but in terms of his unique inner states and his inability to speak and act. The paper also, incidentally, documents the cultural specificity of even such an apparently basic and universal concept as "person". Aoyagi addresses the "speech styles" of Japanese. These, as is well known, reflect the formality of a situation, and the relations of power and distance between speaker and hearer. These parameters, however, are not set by some mechanistic algorithm, but according to a speaker's personal, and inherently flexible, construal of the discourse situation; they constitute a speaker's subjective vantages. Lansing offers a vantage theory account of Aristotle's theory of forms. He claims that the theory was successively "corrupted", first by Porphyry, then by Linnaeus, to survive in latter-day feature theories of structuralist linguistics.

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What was initially a way of delimiting species, became, for Porphyry, a taxonomic tree; the nodes of the tree then became, for Linnaeus, divinely created kinds; while for the structuralists, the higher kinds became abstract semantic features. In conclusion, Love gives a final twist to the theme of the volume by turning the notion of construal onto the very subject matter of linguistic enquiry, i.e., "language", or "languages". He suggests that current notions of what (a) language is have been profoundly influenced by specific cultural and sociopolitical developments in the West. Foremost amongst these was the emergence of nationalism, of nation states, and the attendant phenomenon of language standardization. A more general factor, which not only enabled the process of standardization to take place, but which significantly affected our concept of language itself, has been the invention of writing and the spread of literacy. On the one hand, one might want to say that the existence of literacy is a precondition for progress in any scientific or intellectual enquiry. But when the object of study is, precisely, language, the fact of literacy subtly changes our conception of the object of study. Literacy makes it possible for an utterance to be fixed, and contemplated outside of the communicative context in which it was produced. Thus arises the notion that there exists something more abstract and intangible than the utterance, some underlying invariant, of which the utterance is but an instance. Love reminds us that this notion, so central to linguistic theory, is itself the product of culture and history. The papers in this volume have in common a rejection of objectivist semantics that Austin sketched in his essay "How to Talk". But over and above their sharing of this privative feature, the papers, in their different ways, each promote the notion of construal, i. e., the relationship between a speaker (or hearer) and a situation that he conceptualizes and portrays, as an important parameter of linguistic meaning. Some (e. g., Tsohatzidis, MacLaury) have focused on the role of cognitive events inside the individual language user; others (Casad, Dirven, Matsuki, Jäkel, etc.) on the role of patterns of construal made available by the conventional resources of a language; while the influence of sociocultural factors on these linguistic conventions is documented by Geeraerts and Grondelaers, and others. Taking a broader perspective still, Langacker, Heine, and MacLaury touch on presumably universal aspects of construal. I trust that this collection of papers will give the reader an insight into some of the exciting, even if (for some) unorthodox, directions which current semantic research is taking.

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John R. Taylor

Notes 1. References to Austin's essays are to Austin (1979). 2. Austin's attitude to "truth" is ambivalent. Note the opening sentence of How to do things with words: What I shall have to say here is neither difficult nor contentious; the only merit I should like to claim for it is that of being true, at least in parts. (Austin 1989: 1) In the final chapter, however, he admits to an inclination "to play Old Harry" with what he calls the "true/false fetish" (1989: 151). With this curious phrase, Austin seems to be saying that while "truth" may well be one important aspect of linguistic semantics, it is not the only one, and that a fixation on truth can cause us to ignore these other aspects.

References Austin, John L. 1979 Philosophical papers. (3rd edition.) Oxford: Clarendon Press. 1980 How to do things with words. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Berlin, Brent-Paul Kay 1969 Basic color terms: Their universality and evolution. Berkeley: University of California Press. Bierwisch, Manfred 1981 "Basic issues in the development of word meaning", in: Werner Deutsch (ed.), The child's construction of language. London: Academic Press, 341-387. Ekman, Paul-Robert W. Levenson-Wallace V. Friesen 1983 "Automatic nervous system activity distinguishes among emotions", Science 221: 1208-1210. Fodor, Jerry A. 1981 Representations: Philosophical essays on the foundations of cognitive science. Brighton: Harvester Press. Jackendoff, Ray 1983 Semantics and cognition. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 1991 Semantic structures. Cambridge: MA: MIT Press. Kay, Paul 1983 "Linguistic competence and folk theories of language", Proceedings of the annual meeting of the Berkeley Linguistic Society 9: 128-137. Kövecses, Zoltän 1986 Metaphors of anger, pride, and love. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. 1990 Emotion concepts. New York: Springer. Lakoff, George 1972 "Hedges: A study in meaning criteria and the logic of fuzzy concepts", Papers from the eighth regional meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society, 183-228. 1987 Women, fire, and dangerous things: What categories reveal about the mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lakoff, George-Mark Johnson 1980 Metaphors we live by. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Langacker, Ronald W. 1987 Foundations of cognitive grammar. Vol. 1. Stanford: Stanford University Press. 1990 Concept, image, and symbol: The cognitive basis of grammar. Berlin. Mouton

de Gruyter.

Introduction: On construing the world

21

Lewis, Clive S. 1967 Studies in words. (2nd edition.) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Matthei, Edward-Thomas Roeper 1983 Understanding and producing speech. London: Fontana Paperbacks. Miller, George-Philip Johnson-Laird 1976 Language and perception. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press. Putnam, Hilary 1988 Representation and reality. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Schank, Roger-Robert Abelson 1977 Scripts, plans, goals and understanding. Hillsdale: Lawrence Erlbaum. Searle, John R. 1992 The rediscovery of mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Taylor, John R. 1989 Linguistic categorization: Prototypes in linguistic theory. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Wierzbicka, Anna 1988 The semantics of grammar. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Williams, Edwin 1982 "The NP cycle", Linguistic Inquiry 13: 277-295.

Seeing it in more than one way Eugene H. Casad

1. Introduction Langacker's view of semantics, as well as that of Lakoff and others, is that semantics does not reflect objective reality, but rather is subjective in nature (cf. Lakoff 1987, 1990; Johnson 1987; Casad 1988a; Givon 1989).' Among others things, semantics incorporates what Langacker terms "conventional imagery" (Langacker 1987, 1988: 6, 1990b, 1991). By this it is meant that semantics takes its form from the whole panoply of alternate ways that speakers have for conceptualizing situations. The speaker's ability to conceptualize situations in a variety of ways is, in fact, the foundation of cognitive semantics (cf. Langacker 1991: 294). Note that this characterization does not specifically refer to visual or perceptual imagery, although of course, in many instances the particular semantic value of an expression is in part determined by these factors. Thus, as both Lakoff and Johnson discuss in detail, much of semantics is experientially based (Lakoff 1987; Johnson 1987). Many sentences that have identical truth values and are therefore "objectively the same" are nonetheless distinct semantically (Tuggy 1981:68-69; Vandeloise 1985:40). In this paper, I look at a range of data from English, Spanish and Cora, a Uto-Aztecan language of Mexico, in order to substantiate those points.2 The analyses are presented within the framework of cognitive grammar as developed by Ronald W. Langacker, exemplified by such recent works as Langacker (1987, 1990a, 1990b, 1991) and by an increasing number of his associates (cf., for example, Achard 1993, to appear; Cook 1988; Hawkins 1984; Lindner 1981; Manney 1993; Rice 1987; Smith 1987, Tuggy 1981; Vandeloise 1985, to appear and van Hoek 1992, to appear). In particular, I focus on certain kinds of data to show that one of the most important facets of semantic structure, one that is consistently overlooked by the analyses and explanations of formal semantics, is the speaker's role in construing entities and interrelationships in particular ways, not always predictable, but almost always motivated by discoverable aspects of particular usages of a grammatical construction (Wierzbicka 1985; Traugott 1985; Langacker 1987, 1990b, 1991; Casad 1988a; Smith 1987; Taylor 1989).

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The usual strategy employed by both formal syntax and formal semantics is to consider the speaker's role in framing the form of his utterance to be a part of "pragmatics" and to conclude that information related to such speaker roles is outside the interest of syntax and semantics per se. In the following sections of this paper, I illustrate, first, the kinds of conceptual entities that need to be invoked in accounting for the various ways that speakers have for talking about particular scenarios. I go on to illustrate the kind of formal analysis that results when the speaker's construal of the situation is ignored. Finally, I illustrate the kinds of analyses that emerge from a usage-based view of grammar, in which the notion of construal is given both a rich meaning and its rightful place in the account of the forms that grammars take.

2. Seeing it in more than one way One of our most basic cognitive capacities is the ability to view a situation or scenario from a number of different perspectives, making distinct comments on it, depending on both what we want to say about it and how much detail we want to put into our description. As Givon appropriately notes, the number of distinct descriptions of a particular situation that a speaker can contrive is essentially open-ended (Givon 1989: 89). Much in the spirit of his discussion of the description someone might give of a man beating a dog in a park (1989: 88-90), let us take a scenario that involves two people, a stream that is running quite swiftly because of heavy rain in the area and a speaker vantage point from the side of the stream opposite the two people.3 We also know that they have just gone from one side of the stream to the other. The sentences in (1) represent some of the statements that we could make regarding this scenario. (1) a. The man and the boy crossed the stream. b. The struggling pair just barely made it to the other side ot the stream. c. Two people waded the stream. d. The stream was crossed by two people. e. The crossing of the stream was accomplished by two people. f. The crossing of the stream was done with extreme difficulty. g. The crossing of the stream was made difficult by the high water level. Each of these sentences makes some kind of assertion about the event, but does so in its own way, selecting certain entities and interactions for

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comment, while backgrounding other details or leaving them implicit to the particular account given. For example, sentence (la) highlights the individual participants and categorizes them, i. e., a man and boy, at the same time that it describes their activity in global terms, i.e., they crossed the stream. On the other hand (Ib) treats the two individuals as a single multiplex entity without identifying or categorizing either one. The use of the lexical item pair explicitly designates two generic entities. The sentence itself places the highest degree of prominence on the difficulty of the situation by drawing on the adjective struggling and linking it to the pair in question. This tells the hearer that these two people had to work hard in order to cross the stream, as evidenced by the adverbs just and barely, which contribute the implication that the work was so difficult that they almost failed to reach their goal. Finally, the notion of crossing is designated in part by an explicit designation of the goal that the people were following. In this sentence, the speaker implicitly relates him/herself to the location of the goal in the situation with the use of the prepositional phrase to the other side of the stream. The speaker's involvement consists in his location serving as an implicit reference point in terms of which the notion the other side is defined. This low-profile reference-point role correlates with a high degree of subjectivity in the speaker's usage (cf. Langacker 1985, 1987, 1990a, 1991). The crossing itself is expressed by the schematic process verb to make. The speaker's attitudes often directly shape the form of an utterance. This is a possible explanation for the appropriate usage of (Ic) in the stream-crossing situation. One of the observers, for instance, might be quite insecure and try to cover this up by making a gross understatement of the situation, i. e., the comment in (Ic) makes no reference whatsoever to anything unusual in the crossing of the stream. The expression two people directly expresses lexically the number of entities involved, a notion that is sublexical in the use of the expression pair in (Ib) (cf. Talmy 1987: 190; Langacker 1990b: 75). The speaker's use of the verb waded is the real source of the understatement. Ordinarily, wading is a pleasurable activity involving no salient expenditure of energy on the part of the wader. It is also a relatively undirected activity; that is, the wader usually is not interested in going anywhere, in contrast to the traverser, who does have a particular goal in mind. The understatement therefore also downplays the successful crossing of the swollen stream. Whereas the first three sentences of (1) place the highest degree of prominence on the people who crossed the stream, the sentences in (Id-

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g) place the highest degree of prominence on either the stream itself (Id) or on the essential interactions within the scene, i. e., the crossing of the stream (le-g). In (Id) the stream is accorded highest prominence semantically, with the joint agents of the process of crossing backgrounded, as seen by their syntactic status as object of the preposition by in postverbal position. This is therefore a kind of passive sentence, but not a prototypical one, since the stream itself was not affected in any way by the event.4 The passive verb phrase was crossed presents the activity in global perspective without elaborating at all on any degree of expended effort on the part of the agents involved in the activity. The usage of cross illustrated by sentence (la) is basically processual. This means that the notion is being construed by the speaker as a series of successive states through time in which each successive state reflects a change in the configuration of the interrelationships that held in a previous state. All of these changing states are summed up in a complex configuration that has a beginning state, distinct intermediate states and a unique final state. This is what Langacker terms the temporal profile of a process (Langacker 1987: 244, 1990b: 81, 1991: 223). This characterization of the notion process allows us to characterize precisely the difference between the verbal use of cross in (la) and the use of the participial in (Id). In (Id), the speaker is focusing on the completion of the event and construes the most salient subpart of the setting within which it occurred as a highlighted passive subject. The event itself is presented atemporally, a perspective in which the successive states of its temporal profile are presented as a set whose members collectively form a complex configuration. All of this is effected by the use of the perfective participle -ed (cf. Langacker 1987: 220-221, 1990b: 129-131, 1991: 131-134). Not only do speakers have the ability to focus differentially on the beginning and end points of a changing configuration, they can also focus on the entire set of states that comprise the temporal profile of a process. This allows them to treat an event as a distinct entity and manipulate it syntactically like a noun. Thus, in English, a verb can take an -ing suffix that we call a gerund. This is illustrated by the usages of cross in sentences (le-g). The construal of cross as a derived nominal has distinct syntactic consequences (cf. Langacker 1987: 246-247), 1990b: 80, 1991: 52-53). In particular, it takes the definite article, just like ordinary concrete nouns. In addition, whereas the nominal stream is the direct object of cross in its verbal usages, in the nominalized usages of cross, stream is related to crossing as the object of a preposition in a prepositional phrase that specifies the notion of crossing in further detail.

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By according prominence to the event and then construing that event as a discrete entity, the speaker of English frees him/herself to make additional descriptive statements about the stream-crossing scenario. Thus in (le), the speaker highlights the event as involving a significant amount of purposeful, expended energy. This highlighting is done by the selection of the passive verb phrase was accomplished. In addition, the crossing is saliently labeled a success, partly by the meaning of the verb itself and partly by the particular tense-aspect used in this expression, i. e., the perfective use of the past tense morpheme -ed. In (If), on the other hand, the speaker selects the schematic verb do to signal the successful carrying out of the endeavor, but adds the prepositional phrase with extreme difficulty to highlight the concurrent struggle that the pair were involved in. Finally, (Ig) makes explicit reference to both the swollen state of the stream at the time of the effort and to the attendant condition of difficulty associated with that endeavor, while specifically stating a causal connection between the swollen state of the stream and the difficulty experienced in the crossing of it. There is no mention in (Ig) of a volitional agent who carried out the crossing of the stream; instead this is left implicit as a sublexical part of the meaning of the word crossing.

3. Some simplistic formal analyses In Langacker's view grammatical structure is organized in part by "the content requirement". The only structures that appear in the grammar are: (a) the linguistic structures that are directly attested by the data; (b) the structures that are schematic for the attested linguistic structures; and (c) the categorization relationships that occur both within grammatical constructions and within schematic networks (cf. Langacker 1987: 5354, 1990b: 18-19). The problems with most formal approaches to both syntactic and semantic analysis relate as much to what these analyses do not say as to what they do say. Among the facets of semantic structure that are commonly ignored by formal semanticists are: (a) processing time; (b) event coordination; (c) relative prominence; (d) figure/ground alignment; (e) levels of organization; (f) sequential scanning; (g) degrees of schematicity; (h) scope of predication; and (i) effective homogenity (Langacker 1990: 101). All of these are part and parcel of what Langacker calls "the con-

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strual relation" and are needed in order to give an observationally accurate and explanatorily adequate account of the semantics of natural language. Strictly formal accounts are often simplistic in both the assumptions that they make about relevant data and the notational devices that they employ for both describing and explaining semantic phenomena. In this section, I illustrate these points with three analyses from Jackendoff (1983). In later sections I present contrastive cognitive-grammar analyses of some English data as well as from my own research on the Cora language of Northwest Mexico. In a few cases in this paper, I have elaborated on Langacker's examples. Intuitively, I find Jackendoff's formal representations of "conceptual structures" to be unconvincing. Basically, these representations frequently fly in the face of this English speaker's intuitions about what is relevant for an adequate description of the data, i.e., what is salient to the representation vis-ä-vis what is backgrounded to one degree or another. For example, let us consider the use of the "functor" GO. In order to capture generalizations according to his grammatical constraint, Jackendoff posits classes of events that are defined according to certain semantic functions. Thus, one class of events is a GO class (1983: 171-172). Here Jackendoff is using GO as a functor in the sense of mathematical logic, which ostensibly bears no affinity whatsoever with the English motion verb go (cf. Lakoff 1987: 221-222, 227). Note, for example, that GO has grammaticalized versions in which it signals purposeful action, rather than physical motion toward a point in three dimensional space. A typical example is (2a), which contrasts with the motion verb use of go in (2b). (2)

a. / am going to build a workshop. b. / am going to the workshop.

Jackendoff rejects the idea that the function GO can be construed as expressing a change of state from one position to another. His first argument is that GO is not restricted to occurring with bounded paths, but also with directions and routes and that "GO expresses the traversal of every point" along a path (1983: 174). His real concern is that such a construal would eliminate "a primitive spatial function" (1983: 174). Here he seems to equate his GO function with that of [PATH]. His fear, however, is neither logically necessary nor cognitively valid. The notion of [PATH] is certainly not a primitive, but can rather be treated as an

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image schema (cf. Miller-Johnson-Laird 1977; Casad 1982, 1992; Hawkins 1984; Johnson 1987; Lakoff 1987; Lindner 1981). Furthermore, the data do not support Jackendoff's contentions. Thus, various kinds of construals are possible that he does not mention. Four of these are given in (3a-e). (3)

a.

He went from first to second base on a wild throw.

b.

He goes only part way without taking a rest.

c.

Her cheeks go from rosy pink to bright red every time she hears that phrase. d. It goes from glossy to dull with exposure to the sun. Sentence (3a) expresses the change of location from one position to another within a more complex and more extended pathway. The portion of the path that the player traverses is backgrounded to the endpoints, an aspect of conceptual structure that Jackendoff consistently ignores in his analyses. Example (3b) indicates an indefinite number of shorter bounded areas within a more extensive but backgrounded pathway. Sentence (3c) illustrates the use of go to indicate the change of facial pallor from its normal state to one revealing acute embarrassment, whereas (3d) expresses the expected change in the appearance of a discrete object that is expressed by the polar terms glossy/dull. Jackendoff's claim that the functor GO cannot be construed as expressing a change of state can only be maintained by ignoring examples such as these and it must be abandoned if he hopes to be observationally adequate. Jackendoff's use of functor labels that have the same orthographic content as conventionalized lexical items in English amounts to obfuscation rather than elucidation. His treatment of GO as a functor is also not well-based in several other respects. He finds himself in a quandary as to know how to characterize the relationships between GO as a verb of motion, as in (4a), GO as a verb of temporal extent, as in (4b), and GO as a verb of spatial extent, as in (4c). (4)

a. He goes from San Diego to Los Angeles three times a week. b. He goes nonstop from morning till night staring at his computer screen. c. The divided road goes all the way from Nogales to Navojoa.

His problem is that he cannot decide how to interpret GO and GOext: are they distinct functions that share a good deal of internal structure or are they the same function with an interpretive rule specifying that you get either a traversal construal or an extent construal, depending on whether

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you are dealing with an [EVENT] or a [STATE] (1983: 173)? His alternatives may well be notational variants, but the second one seems to lend itself to a more adequate characterization of the data, whereas the characterization of GO and Goext as discrete abstract functions is misleading. Jackendoff really needs to characterize these notions in terms of figure and ground relationships that are realized within particular conceptual domains. In particular, Jackendoff needs to link GO to the directed path image schema, which is a concept that has a directly understood structure of its own (cf. Casad 1992) and is used metaphorically to structure related concepts (cf. Lakoff 1987: 283; Lindner 1981: 171-173). A second set of examples concerns his conceptual structures related to the events "possess", "receive" and "lose". With respect to the notion "possess", Jackendoff lumps together as synonymous the sentences Beth has the doll, Beth possesses the doll, Beth owns the doll and The doll belongs to Beth (1983: 192). All these sentences are given the single representation shown in (5). (5)

[StateBEPoss([DOLL], [PlaceATPoss([BETH])])]

As it stands, Jackendoff's representation most closely relates to The doll belongs to Beth, which differs from Beth has the doll, Beth posseses the doll, and Beth owns the doll in both its figure-ground organization and its lexical content. In The doll belongs to Beth, the doll is the salient figure and Beth is the salient landmark or ground of the relationship, whereas the situation is exactly reversed in the other three sentences. The verbparticle construction belongs to lexicalizes this figure-ground reversal. With respect to the other three sentences, the verbs have, possess, and own each structure the possessive relationship in a different way, have indicating a schematic associative relationship, which in some contexts designates a possessive relationship and in other contexts designates other kinds of relationships, including that of being affected by an ailment, e. g., Beth has a cold, and that of obligation, e. g., Beth has to go to school. Both possess and own are more specific with regard to the notion of possession. Possess places the highest degree of salience on the possessorpossessed inanimate object relation, whereas own places the highest degree of salience on the possessor's control over the possessed inanimate object. The differences between all of these verbs become even more evident when we examine the extended usages and paraphrases of each. All four of these verbs, i.e., belong to, have, possess, own, relate to distinct experiential gestalte in Lakoff's terms (cf. also Geeraerts 1988; Taylor 1988, 1989).

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The final pair of Jackendoff 's examples that I discuss are Beth received the doll and Beth lost the doll, whose putative conceptual structures are given in (6a) and (6b). (6)

a.

[EventGOposs([DOLL],[pathTOposs([BETH])])]

b.

[EventGOPoss([DOLL],[pathFROMposs([BETH])])]

An examination of the conceptual structures that Jackendoff associates with each shows that formally the only difference between receive and lose is reputed to be the directionality of the path associated with the function GO (cf. 1983: 192). In other words, Jackendoff's notation characterizes Beth received the doll as being the semantic inverse of Beth lost the doll. This would not be so bad if the meaning of the sentence Beth lost the doll could be fully characterized as Now you see it; now you don't (Doris Bartholomew, personal communication February 1991). Obviously, however, there is a lot more to the story. For one, the two sentences differ in the degree of intentionality associated with the subject role. The subject of receive does so intentionally and (usually) consciously, whereas the subject of lose prototypically does so unintentionally. Note in passing that Jackendoff classes both sentences as noncausative (1983: 193), but incorrectly says that the subject exercises no control in either sentence. However, in at least one reading of receive, the subject obviously does exercise some kind of control, one that can be paraphrased as "to take possession of. In other words, in many of its usages, the conceptual scene associated with "X receives Y" also includes the implicit situation that Z gives or offers to give Υ to X and X takes Υ (cf. also Langacker 1990b: 226-228). This accounts for certain other usages of receive, such as in Beth received a generous inheritance. In this case, the control is exercised by an unspecified agent who graciously included Beth in the benefits of his or her estate. A similar example is seen in the sentence We mailed a doll to Beth, but she never received it. In this case, the control is attributed to the subject of the initial clause (and perhaps also in the post office) which creates the potential for Beth to receive something. To summarize, there certainly is a class of GO verbs in English, but not every verb that relates to a conceptual scene in which some entity moves or gets moved is a member of that class. Jackendoff's use of functors as schematic class markets (cf. 1983: 204) needs to be linked to psychological reality and to reflect the generalizations that English speakers really do extract from the established patterns of the language. For this English speaker, verb phrases such as butter the bread (Jackendoff 1983: 185) are

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definitely not GO verbs, nor is Spanish Hover 'to rain' a GO verb (1983: 185). Here, Lakoff's comment on the need to attend to the linguistic details is especially appropriate (cf. Lakoff 1987: 379), as is Langacker's content requirement for grammars (mentioned earlier), that rules out all arbitrary devices used to make descriptions internally coherent (Langacker 1987: 53-54, 488, 1990b: 18-19).

4. Construal: Conventional imagery In Langacker's terms, all grammatical units are symbolic structures that pair a meaning with phonological form. In this framework, a semantic structure is a conceptual structure that serves as the semantic pole of a linguistic expression (Langacker 1987: 98). Thus, a given semantic structure is a portion of a greater bipolar, symbolic structure, whereas conceptual structure is unipolar, not multifaceted. Grammatical structure more generally is the conventional symbolization of semantic structure. In Langacker's view, therefore, all grammatical structures are inherently symbolic regardless of their internal complexity. Symbolization is largely nonarbitrary because the prototype for complex expressions is for them to be analyzable into smaller, meaningful components; usually a salient relationship exists between a composite structure and the morphemes and lexical items that compose it. Grammatical structure also embodies conventional imagery (Smith 1987: 57-63). There are various aspects to the semantic properties that Langacker subsumes under "conventional imagery". They include the following: (a) alternate construals of scenes; (b) alternate paths of composition; (c) alternate salience of parts; (d) different levels of specificity; and (e) alternate speaker vantage points (Langacker 1987: 51; Lindner 1981: 227;Tuggy 1981: 60-71). To illustrate this, it is clear that different languages code the same conceptual structure by means of different images. In examples (7a-d), from Cora and English, the same conceptual structure corresponds to the same entity or situation in objective reality. (7) a. b. c. d.

Cora: yuhtyiviina ahka'iwaimi tyaiika metyenyu

vs. vs. vs. vs.

English: hillbilly a long time ago dust devel It just thundered

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Both the Cora word yuhtyiviina and the English word hillbilly designate a class of people who have moved into the speaker's area from a region characterized by hilly terrain. In both cases, the people are viewed as a distinct social class. Yet semantically they are very different. The Cora word consists of a nominalized morphemically complex topographic adverb. The initial y- 'here' indicates the speaker's location, the following -uh- designates a path straight up the slope of a hill from the speaker's location, the suffix sequence -tyivi designates the goal of that path, which is the point of origin of the designated person, i.e., an uphill area. Finally, -na designates the individual in schematic terms. On the other hand, the English word consists of a noun-noun compound, in which the first noun hill specifies the location from which a person comes and billy designates the person in a patronizing, if not pejorative manner. The Cora use of the term yuhtyiviina, however, ranges from neutral emotive value to strongly antagonistic. In terms of imagery, compositionality and social implications, the apparently functionally equivalent terms are quite different. The terms in (7b) illustrate an even more closely matched concept that is construed in very different ways in Cora and English. Both terms are adverbials, designating a point of time in the distant past, far removed from the time of the speech act in which the terms are employed. The Cora term akha'iwä-'imi is a topographic adverbial phrase consisting of the topographic adverb meaning "off at the side of the hill" and the degree adverb imi which means "far away". The particular usage thus represents the extension of a purely spatial term into the temporal domain. On the other hand, the English phrase a long time ago reifies the concept of temporal succession, lexicalizing it as an unanalyzable nominal form and modifying it with an adjective that normally contributes the notion of spatial extension to the noun it modifies. In this case, the meaning of the adjective accommodates to the nominal, taking on a temporal construal, which is reinforced by the temporal adverb ago. This adverbial functions in the same way as the Cora imi in that it locates an event in the remote past relative to the time of speaking. Once again, both languages have functionally equivalent conventionalized expressions that designate the same concept in the projected world, but they employ very different means for expressing that concept. Example (7c) concerns a meteorological phenomenon, i.e., a small rapidly twisting column of air that picks up dirt from off the ground as it moves along. The Cora term for this is tyaiika. One common English term is dust devil. The Cora expression is constructed from a locative

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Eugene H. Casad

prefix tya- 'in the middle of a flat surface' and a following body part noun 'iika 'foot'. Cora has a common pattern in which a locative prefix or a sequence of prefixes in combination with a following body-part nominal designates a possessive relation. This term may well have originally meant "the one who has a foot on the ground", but it has most likely lost its analyzability for the present-day Cora. On the other hand, the English term is fully analyzable. The initial word in this loose compound designates the entity that gets stirred up into a cloud just above ground level, whereas the second word, which is the head of the compound, is a nominal form that reifies the column of twirling air as a malevolent spiritual force. One way of contrasting the Cora and English expressions is to say that the Coras have lexicalized the effect of the phenomenon in terms of their system of locative prefixes and body part names, whereas English speakers have focused on the presumed causer of the event. The terms in (7d) also relate to meteorological phenomena. To refer to the sound of thunder that follows a bolt of lightning, the Cora use the expression, me-tye-nyuu 'they responded' (3pL.suBJ-PERF-respond), whereas English uses the third singular impersonal It thundered. In this case, we English speakers focus on the observed phenomenon without saliently designating any particular cause. On the other hand, the use of the third person plural subject prefix in Cora portends a whole complex network of knowledge about the personages who are responsible for the forces of nature. The use of the verb meaning "to respond" points to another aspect of that cultural knowledge, i. e., the necessity for the religious leaders to perform particular rituals in order to provoke the responsible personages to come to earth with the rains. To summarize, both Cora and English have succinct ways for designating the very same meteorological event in the physical environment, but their respective phrases imply completely distinct foci and networks of cultural knowledge. This potential for differential expression could not occur if it were really true that semantic structure is both universal and is conceptual structure tout court (cf. Lakoff 1987: 311).

5. Construal: Fitting the pieces together Structures that designate the same conceptual entity may have different compositional paths, i. e., they may be composed of different morphemes, or consist of the same morphemes combined in different ways, or simply reflect variable directness in their conventional symbolization of concep-

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tual structure. For example, Langacker's pair father and male parent may designate the same individual in the objective scene, but they encode information in two different ways and are therefore not synonymous (Langacker 1987: 293-294, 462; 1990b: 10). In particular, the gender of the designated relative and the generational relationship are overtly lexicalized by the component morphemes in male parent, respectively, but are sublexical and are therfore symbolized directly by the word father.5 A restriction to particular domains is another part of their differential meaning. For one, I would more likely use the term male parent when discussing penguins than I would when discussing humans. In a genetics class, however, the term male parent would be fully appropriate. As a second example, English employs a single unanalyzable morpheme to encode the concept "coffee". Yaqui, of Northern Mexico, and Luiseno, of Southern California, both encode that concept by means of an adjective noun construction involving the concepts "black" and "water", but they combine the grammatical elements in opposite orders (8a-c). (8)

English: [coFFEE]/[khofiy] Yaqui: [[BLACK][wATER]]/[[cukui][baa'a] —> [COFFEE] Luiseno: [[wATER][BLACK]]/[[paala][yuvataat] —> [COFFEE]

Structures with the same compositonal paths may also have vastly different meanings. Compare the Luiseno example above with the following from Spanish that almost, but not quite, matches it compositionally. The Spanish example (9) is conventionally expressed as a plural form, indicating a mass noun, but does not conventionally designate "coffee". (9)

Spanish: [[AGUA-S] [NEGRA-S]] —> [SEWAGE] Water-PL Black-PL

One would not, therefore, order three cups of coffee using the expression in (10): (10)

*Deme tres aguas negras, por favor. *Give me three cups of coffee, please.

Alternate construals of a given situation can easily be built into a single sentence, as in (11), which I concocted while packing my luggage for a trip starting the following day. (11)

Wow! This is either going to be a long night, or a short one.

In (11) my use of "long night" referred to the potential for many hours to be spent packing my bags, whereas the use of "short one" referred to

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the potential for my having very few hours to sleep. This is just a typical example that illustrates a basic cognitive ability that we have for quickly shifting from one image to another in the flow of discourse (cf. Langacker 1990b: 12).

6. Construal: The speaker's vantage point Cora locative prefix plus verb stem constructions illustrate in a striking way the need for invoking the relation of construal between the speaker and the situation in which he employs a given utterance. In addition, these constructions vividly illustrate the role of conventional imagery in grammar. Finally, they provide an endless stream of examples that suggest strongly the need to distinguish between conceptual structure per se and its conventionalization as semantic structure. The Cora examples in (12a-e) show the range of responses a Cora speaker might give if asked how to describe a well-lit house at night.6 (12)

u-wa-nyeeri-'i inside-EXT-illuminate-STAT 'It is all lit up inside the house' b. u-tye-nyeeri-'i inside-middle-illuminate-STAT 'the doorways and the windows of the house are all lit up.' c. w-ii-ra-nyeeri-'i inside-toward-face out-illuminate-STAT 'It is all lit up in front of the doorway from light coming this way from inside the house.' d. a-ii-ra-nyeeri-'i outside-toward-face out-illuminate-STAT 'It is all lit up on the ground by light coming through the doorway.' e. a-ii-re 'e-nyeeri- Ί outside-toward-around corner-illuminate-STAT 'It is all lit up at the side of the house by a light at the back of the house.' a.

These five sentences represent very different images of a lit-up house viewed at night. The speaker's vantage point is crucial to an adequate explanation of these data. In all cases, the speaker is viewing the house from an external viewpoint, but both the vantage point and the scope of

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his field of vision differ. Thus, in (12a), the speaker is either close enough to the door that he can see a substantial part of the interior and infer that the illumination extends throughout that interior area or the windows and doorways are numerous and expansive enough for him to reasonably draw that inference. In (12b), the speaker is standing far enough away from the house to take in the whole expanse of the house within his field of vision which allows him to focus more or less simultaneously on the illumination visually accessible through the door and the windows. In (12c), the speaker is pro to typically looking straight through the doorway and has within his field of vision an illuminated area that is partly inside the house and partly outside of it so that he perceives a natural directionality of the illumination toward his own position. The speaker's focus of attention in (12d) is confined totally to the outside of the house. This expression would be appropriate either for light coming from a fixture mounted above the doorway and shining out into the front yard or light coming from within the house, the whose interior source is being ignored by the speaker, whose vantage point may well be oblique to the doorway. Finally, in (12e), the speaker is looking along one side of the house, and sees a well-lit area in the back of the house, which has one of its boundaries determined by the corner of the house. This allows the speaker to correctly infer that the unseen source of illumination is around the corner of the house from his own position. To summarize, an explicit characterization of a conceptual scene and its components is needed here in order to give an observationally adequate characterization of these data. This characterization must also note the differing degrees of subjectivity or objectivity with which the speaker presents the scene (cf. Langacker 1990a: 7, 34; 1990b: 12; 1991: 215-).7

7. Construal: Categorizing nuts and fishes The construal relation allows the speaker to handle figurative language easily and coherently. Often salient similarities will evoke immediate understanding. For example, a walnut is hard shelled and round. We conventionally call it a nut\ for some of us, the walnut represents the prototypical member of the class that also includes cashew nuts, coconuts, pecans, brazil nuts and peanuts. (For others of us, however, the peanut is the prototypical one.) Common in industrial societies is a small piece of metal with a threaded hole in its middle which is approximately equidimensional. It usually has a hexagonal cross section, sometimes a square-

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shaped one. The threads in the hole in its middle allow it to be attached, by turning it, to a metal shaft with a threaded end, called a boh, whereas the small piece of metal that attaches to it is called, in English, a nut. The approximately equidimensional shape of the industrial nut, as well as its obvious hardness and hollowness, allow the speaker to apply the term nut, meaning a hard-shelled edible fruit, to the metal object. The speaker's knowledge of the distinct functions and non-shared characteristics of the two entities allows him to keep them apart conceptually. The choice of the lexical item nut to designate an industrial implement reflects the following categorization, in which semantic units are indicated by the use of capital letters, whereas phonological units are marked by lower case letters. The slash mark represents the symbolization relationship and the arrow indicates semantic extension: (13)

[[[wALNUT]/[nut]) —» [[HEXAGONAL BLOCK]/[nut]]]

Cultures do not necessarily construe these entities in the same way. It is instructive to compare the English and Spanish terms for two particular kinds of this industrial fastening device, e.g., the regular hex nut and the winged nut. (14)

English: nut wingnut

Spanish: tuerca palomilla

English views the industrial implement as analogous to a hard-shelled edible fruit; Spanish views it in terms of the required motion that results in its becoming attached to a bolt; this motion in Spanish being called tornillo. Also, note that Spanish treats bolt as a masculine gender noun, but nut as a feminine gender noun. For a wingnut, both English and Spanish focus on the two protuberances at opposite sides of the nut and both languages relate the pair of protuberances to the form of a bird, but English names the body part, whereas Spanish names it after a particular species of bird, i. e., paloma 'dove', and makes prominent the smallness of the nut itself by attaching the diminutive suffix -ilia. As another example of the cultural specificity of semantic structure, I mention the example of English fish and Cora we'i 'fish'. The point is that the English nominal fish designates the entire class of acquatic creatures with scales and gills, without singling out any one single species. English fish, therefore, is a fully generic lexical item. On the other hand, Cora we'i serves both to designate the entire class of fishes, as well as to

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designate what is, for the Cora, the probable prototypical member of the class, the catfish. The differences between English fish and Cora we'i are much more broad than just the categorical structure. To begin, both English and Cora call on nominal stems to serve in predicate roles. Thus, conventional English usage allows us to take the root fish and put it into a sentence such as (15): (15)

I am fishing.

This sentence means that the speaker is engaged in a particular activity that is directed toward his capturing a nominal object which is incorporated into a verb phrase of the form shown in (16): (16)

VP = BE + Noun-ing

Cora views the fishing scene in very different terms. Rather than using we'i as an incorporated noun to designate this activity, the Cora either use the incorporated noun kwe'itfi'ipwa 'fishhook' as in (17a), or a transitive clause with a verb meaning "to kill", as in (17b). (17)

nya-kweiti'ipwa I-fishhook Ί am fishing with a hook and line.' b. ny-au-ce'e we'i-tye kuura I-LOC.Base-still fish-PL kill Ί am fishing.'

a.

Example (17b) probably reflects the method of killing fish by throwing a stick of dynamite into the water, resulting in death by concussion. More recently, Coras have also begun spearing fish using primitive spearguns. Cora also uses a conventionalized pattern of forming verbs by prefixing the distributive plural prefix to a noun. Thus, the noun 'iqari 'loom' is incorporated into a verb phrase which means 'to weave', as in (18): (18)

nye-tyi-'itah 'I-DiSTR-loom Ί am weaving.'

One might suppose that the distributive prefix plus noun schema would sanction a Cora verb phrase involving the incorporated stem we'i, with the meaning "I'm fishing". However, as the following two examples show, such is not the case. In (19a), the element following the distributive suffix is a homophonous morpheme meaning "to speak falsely". In (19b),

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a second schematic pattern comes into play, one that summarizes equational statements of the form 'X is a Y'. Thus, the Cora sentence that prefixes tyi'i- to the noun we'i 'fish' comes out meaning "I am a fish". (19) a. nye-tyi'i-we'i I-DiSTR-speak:falsely Ί am telling lies.' b. nye-tyi'i-\vei I-DISTR-fish

Ί am a fish.' In addition to the foregoing, I must also mention that you cannot compute the meaning "I'm fishing" from a nya-kwe'itj:iipwa. This shows that the composite structure has conventionalized meaning beyond that of its component morphemes. Conventional imagery, then, is seen in that English and Cora structure the same conceptual scene in very different ways. English places primary salience upon the person engaged in the activity as the responsible energetic instigator of that activity. It places secondary salience (prominence) upon the object of the endeavor. On the other hand, Cora places primary salience upon the responsible energetic instigator or purposing entity, and then places secondary salience on the instrument by means of which the activity is carried out. The entity being sought is not even lexicalized in

8. Kinds of categorizing relationships Categorizing relationships of various sorts and degrees of abstraction relate conventionalized usages to the generalizations that speakers employ in framing their thoughts for linguistic expression. These relationships can consist of either elaborations or specializations and exist at all linguistic levels. One example in phonology is the categorizing relationship between alternate pronunciations of what speakers normally recognize as being instances of the same word. These relationships are oftentimes reciprocal, as in (20a) and (20b). (20) a. [raewt] «-»[rut] route b. [i:or] «-+ [a'or] either In syntax, a typical example of a categorizing relationship involves the elaboration of common phrasal patterns. For example, the schematic

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pattern for a propositional phrase is elaborated in a number of distinct ways by the examples in (21a-b) (21)

a. P NP -> [[beside][the house]] b. P NP -»· [[inside][the barn]]

A common elaboration of the verb phrase is a sequence of a verb plus a noun phrase consisting of some kind of an article or modifier and a following head noun that functions as the direct object of the verb as in (22a-d). These sequences are often enough vehicles for metaphors. (22)

a. b. c. d.

V NP V NP V NP V NP

-* [[stub][one's toe]] — [[skin][the cat]] —· [[break][the bank]] -» [[water][the lawn]]

A third common categorizing relationship in English syntax involves a verb phrase that not only has a following object-noun phrase, but also has a phrase-final preposition, often referred to as a "particle", as in (23a-c)(cf. Lindner 1981: 2). (23)

a. V NP P — [[[wake][the children][up]]] b. V NP P — [[[bring][the house][down]]] c. V NP P -> [[[pass][the food][around]]]

Spanish has a distinct categorizing pattern for forming attributive noun phrases. In the case illustrated by (24a-b), the pattern is used to indicate that the head noun is composed of the substance that is named by the nominal object of the preposition de. (24)

a. N P N -» [[pan][de trigo]] 'wheat bread' b. N P N —> [[ojo][de agua]] 'spring'

Semantic extensions illustrate a different class of categorizing relationships in which the categorizations are not as clear cut as some of those given above. Many semantic extensions are metaphorical and reflect to varying degrees the ease with which they can be likened to literal meanings or specialized meanings that motivated their use. Langacker accounts for this by attributing varying degrees of salience to the categorizing patterns upon which they are based (Langacker 1987: 386). For example, the English word star, which designates a bright object seen in the sky at night (except for the moon, of course), has become extended into the field of entertainment so that it now designates a person who gained fame in the movie industry, e.g., a movie star, with fur-

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ther extensions to a person carrying the leading role in a movie, play or television program, e.g., the star of the show. In addition, it has become further extended to designate a person who performs exceptionally in fields such as sports, e. g., a star player, and education, e. g., a star pupil. This set of extensions involves the categorizations shown in (25a-c) (cf. Langacker 1987: 386). (25)

a. b.

[[sTAR]/[star] —> [[cELEBRiTY]/[star]]] [[sTAR]/[star] —> [[LEADING PERFORMER]/[star]]]

C.

[[STAR]/[star] —»· [[EXCEPTIONAL]/[star]]]ADJ

The examples in (25) show that semantic extensions occur both within a given grammatical class as well as across grammatical class borders. Note that the noun star is categorized as an adjective in (25c).

9. How you sanction cats Semantic extension is at the heart of linguistic creativity (Langacker 1987: 73; Smith 1987: 55). Extensions of the English word cat provide a glimpse of the convoluted paths that such linguistic creativity follows. To begin, one common extension of cat refers to nondomestic felines, i. e., tiger. This categorization is given in (26). (26)

[[CAT]/[cat] -»[[TiGER]/[cat]]]

English has another extended use of cat to refer to a kind of tractor. This categorization is superficially analogous to the extension that we invoke in referring to a tiger as a "cat", and is given as follows in (27): (27)

[[CAT]/[cat] -» [[TRACTOR]/[cat]]]

It turns out, however, that the "cat" that lies behind the extension to "tractor" is not a four legged feline as is the "cat" that lies behind the extension to "tiger". Instead, the term cat as applied to the tractor is a shortened form of the word caterpillar, which is a fuzzy insect that crawls over the ground aided by numerous pairs of little feet that are hardly perceptible to the observer. This relates directly to the kind of mechanism that a tractor employs for moving across the terrain. In this case we are considering not a "wheel tractor" but a "track tractor", one that has two bands of connected metal plates that are strung over and supported by sets of wheels at each side of the tractor. Tanks, of course, also use this form of locomotion.9

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In short, the way that a track tractor crawls over the ground was perceived by certain industrialists in the US as looking like the way a caterpillar moves across some surface. This perceived similarity carried over into other aspects of the design of the tractor and the operation of the company that began to manufacture it: the tractors were originally all painted yellow since a particularly common large caterpillar is mostly yellow; the company named itself Caterpillar, Inc and the tractor became known as a Caterpillar tractor. A more adequate categorization schema for all this involves the two steps illustrated in (28): (28)

a. b.

[[CATERPiLLAR]/[caterpillar]] —> [[TRACTOR]/[caterpillar]]] [[TRACTOR]/[caterpillar]] —> [[TRACTOR]/[cat]]

A whole range of new usages developed from the shortening of caterpillar to cat. Of a person whose work requires him to operate such a tractor, we may describe his role in life as in (29). (29)

He drives cat all day long.

Caterpillar tractors have come to be employed in both construction work and in fighting fires with forestry services, both because of their power and their stability on a hillside. The extension and shortening of caterpillar to cat shows that in certain contexts native speakers of English have forgotten the original source of tractor cat and have equated it with feline cat. In particular, a tractor driver who works for the Forestry Service in the US is often called a "cat skinner". This term refers to the tractor driver's work in bulldozing down brush and overgrowth to form a roadlike open space along the perimeter of a fire zone in order to prevent the fire from burning a wider area. The road-like zone is called a firebreak and the forceful removal of burnable material with the subsequent leaving of an area of bare gound is likened to the operation of removing the skin from a furry animal such as a cat. The coining of the term cat skinner has apparently been mediated by an extension from the literal expression used to describe skinning cats to the metaphorical expression used to talk about solving problems in general. Thus example (30) presents a common expression used to signal that if one strategy does not work, then another one will. (30)

There's always more than one way to skin a cat.

It is likely that the formation of the compound cat skinner involved sanctioning by both the literal meaning of to skin a cat and the metaphorical expression above. These data, then, illustrate a number of points impor-

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tant to the cognitive-grammar characterization of semantics. For one, several domains may be operative at once. For example, the pattern for forming nominalizations on complex noun phrases by means of the agentive suffix -er is one of them. In addition, a new extension may well spawn a further extension that obscures the difference between two otherwise distinct domains. The new extension may also spawn an extension that is not even directly related to the original concept. Finally, the endpoints of these extensions are commonly unpredictable, but very well motivated.

10. Implications Grammar consists of established patterns for combining simple symbolic expressions into more complex ones. Speakers must exploit the potential that conventional symbolic units afford them for forming linguistic expressions and they must also operate within the constraints that are inherent to particular situations. Usage entails the selection of a target structure as the vehicle for conveying the selected expression. The degree to which a target structure conforms to the conventional units of the grammar is the degree to which the grammar sanctions that usage. A clear implication of the analyses that I have presented is that beyond simply providing the speaker with a means for symbolizing and expressing a complex conceptualization, a grammatical construction also allows him to structure that conceptualization in a particular manner (Langacker 1987: 294). Grammar, in its sanctioning role, allows the speaker bountiful resources to draw on for using alternate grammatical constructions to express ideas related to a single conceptualization or scenario, as we saw in the river-crossing examples. It also allows for the expression of contrastive imagery as we saw in the examples drawn from English, Cora and Spanish. Distinct nuances of meaning can be expressed quite precisely through the choice of particular constructions. This was illustrated by the five Cora examples of the house lit up at night. The freedom that the speaker has for construing his conceptualizations in various ways has widespread grammatical consequences and needs to be an integral facet of any theory of language structure. As Givon aptly notes, the everpresent interpreter of events accompanies each act of coding a message for linguistic expression (1989: 90). Two kinds of figures and ground relationships, base and profile, and trajector and landmark

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also are central to many alternate construals as the discussion of Jackendoff's analyses showed. This paper has also strongly suggested that semantics is not universal, but is very highly constrained by the cultures within which people exist and interact. This suggestion is not new by any means, but has been a central tenet of such functional approaches as Pike's tagmemics, which has for many years insisted on an "emic" analysis of linguistic data and has linked itself to a symbolic view of language by its insistence that grammatical units are form-meaning composites (cf. Pike 1967, 1988). To close, an increasing number of cognitive grammar analyses are beginning to relate the speaker's construal of situations to particular syntactic phenomena. For example, Achard (1993, to appear) relates the choice of French indicative and subjunctive inflectional marking in sentential complements to whether or not the speaker conceptualizes the complement as consisting of a proposition. Cook (1988) applies cognitive grammar to both the morphological and clausal structures of Samoan that relate to the notions of case marking and transitivity in Samoan. He finds as being essential to his analyses the use of constructs such as Langacker's idealized cognitive model of the finite clause, the speaker's construal of the situations that he is discussing and the role of prototypes as standards for categorization. Lindner (1981) presents a cognitive analysis of verbparticle constructions in English that nicely illustrates many of the main tenets of cognitive grammar. Smith (1987) is largely concerned with showing that the choice of accusative vs. dative case marking in German reflects a difference in conventional imagery, i. e., a difference in the way that the speaker construes and structures a scene in order to talk about it linguistically (Smith 1987: 51). Tuggy (1981) discusses various aspects of verb morphology in Tetelcingo Nahuatl (Aztec) that relate to transitivity; he provides cognitive analyses of noun incorporation, verb stem categorization and the causative-applicative suffixes. Both Hawkins (1984) and Vandeloise (1985) concern cognitive analyses of prepositions (Hawkin's dissertation those of English and Vandeloise's those of French), and illustrate clearly the extent to which the speaker's vantage point on a scene relates to the meaning of grammatical structures. Rice (1987) examines in detail three classes of syntactic phenomena that are generally left untreated by formal syntactic and semantic analyses of English data. These include a variety of prepositional verbs with ON, AT, OFF, FROM and WITH. In addition, Rice discusses the semantics of imperfective verbs such as accompany, contain, maintain, surround, admire, regret, feel and afford. The third class of data includes cognate ob-

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jects, omitted objects, reflexives and reciprocals. She considers these data in relation to both the process of passivization and the sliding scale of transitivity proposed by Hopper and Thompson (1980: 251-253). Rice concludes that transitivity is to a significant degree a matter of the speaker's construal of the situation he or she is describing (Rice 1987: 184, 191, 261). Rubba (to appear) shows how the speaker's construal of mental events as either states or processes, to a large degree determines the choice of dative or accusative marking with German verbs of cognition. Finally, Verhagen (to appear) discusses the question of word order within a sentence in terms of Langacker's notions of subjectivity and objectivity. These are only a few of the studies that are now available, in addition to the papers that follow in this volume. Notes 1. I would like to express my thanks to Maurice Aldridge, Ronald W. Langacker, and John Taylor for their comments on this paper. 2. The Cora data on which this paper is based were collected between February 1971 and the present during the course of field investigations carried out under auspices of the Summer Institute of Linguistics. These data are culled from elicited materials such as word lists, extracted from texts, and gleaned from active conversations with Cora speakers. All the Cora data are from the Jesus Maria dialect. I would like to thank numerous Cora speakers, who continue to be my teachers in their language. 3. For a similar discussion of the usages of English run, see Smith 1987: 70-71. 4. Cook (1988) shows that middle clauses in Samoan are in some ways like transitive clauses, but that they are certainly not prototypical transitive clauses, but rather intransitive (1988: 67). 5. The contrast between pair and two persons discussed earlier illustrates the same point. 6. A more detailed account of these examples is given in Casad (1992). 7. Langacker uses these terms to characterize a maximal asymmetry between the conceptualizer and the object which he is conceptualizing (1990a; 1990b: 12). For example, to the extent that the conceptualizer explicitly includes his role as part of some conceptualized event or situation that he wishes to describe, any statement he makes about that scenario is being construed "objectively"; to the extent that he leaves his role in it implicit, the situation being described is being construed "subjectively" (cf. Langacker 1987: 128-132; 1990b: 151, 223). A second instance of the subjective vs. objective distinction is when a speaker treats time as a thing to talk about, i. e., an object of conceptualization in contrast to invoking conceptualizations within the framework of time, i.e., time is employed as the medium of conceptualization (Langacker 1990b: 168). As is the case with many distinctions, the difference is one of degree and few cases are purely at one extreme or the other of the continuum, although the speaker and the hearer who fall within the scope of grounding predications are maximally subjective (1991: 93).

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8. Another aspect of this analysis is that possibly Cora nva-kwe'Ui'ip"'a is a caique from Spanish estoy anzoleando Ί am fishing', which employs the imperfective participial form of the verb anzolear 'to fish with hook and line', cf. also Spanish anzeuelo 'fishhook'. 9. The tracks of World War I tanks were apparently themselves called "caterpillars".

References Achard, Michel 1993 Complementation in French: A cognitive perspective. [Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, San Diego.] to appear "Complement construal in French: A cognitive perspective", in: Eugene H. Casad (ed.), Cognitive linguistics in the Redwoods. Berlin—New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Casad, Eugene H. 1982 Cora locationals and structured imagery. [Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, San Diego.] 1984 "Cora", in: Ronald W. Langacker (ed.), Southern Uto-Aztecan grammatical sketches. Arlington, TX: The University of Texas and the Summer Institute of Linguistics, 152-459. 1988a "Conventionalization of Cora locationals", in: Rudzka-Ostyn (ed.), 345-378. 1988b "Post-conquest influences on Cora (Uto-Aztecan)", in: William Shipley (ed.), In honor of Mary Haas: From the Haas festival conference on Native American linguistics. Berlin-New York-Amsterdam: Mouton de Gruyter, 77-136. 1992 "Cognition, history and Cora yee", Cognitive Linguistics 3(2): 151-186. 1993 "Locations, paths and the Cora verb", in: Richard A. Geiger-Brygida Rudzka-Ostyn (eds.), Conceptualizations in natural language processing. Berlin-New York-Amsterdam: Mouton de Gruyter, 593-645. Casad, Eugene H.-Ronald W. Langacker 1985 " 'Inside' and Outside' in Cora grammar", UAL 51: 247-281. Cook, Kenneth W. 1988 A cognitive analysis of grammatical relations, case, and transitivity in Samoan. [Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, San Diego.] Geeraerts, Dirk 1988 "Where does prototypicality come from?", in: Rudzka-Ostyn (ed.), 207-229. Givon, Talmy 1989 Mind, code and context: Essays in pragmatics. Hillsdale, NJ- London: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Haiman, John (ed.) 1985 Iconicity in syntax. Amsterdam-Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Hawkins, Bruce W. 1984 The semantics of English spatial prepositions. [Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, San Diego.] Hoffman, Robert R. 1985 "Some implications of metaphor for philosophy and psychology of science", in: Paprotte-Dirven (eds.), 327-380. Hopper, Paul J.-Sandra A. Thompson 1980 "Transitivity in grammar and discourse", Language 56: 251-299. Jackendoff, Ray 1983 Grammar and cognition. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

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Johnson, Mark 1987 The body in the mind. Chicago-London: University of Chicago Press. Kosslyn, Stephen Michael 1980 Image and mind. Cambridge, MA—London: Harvard University Press. Lakoff, George 1987 Women, Jlre, and dangerous things. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1990 "The invariance hypothesis: Is abstract reasoning based on image-schemas? Cognitive Linguistics 1: 39-74. Lakoff, George-Mark Johnson 1980 Metaphors we live by. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Langacker, Ronald W. 1985 "Observations and speculations on subjectivity", in: Haiman (ed.), 109-150. 1987 Foundations of cognitive grammar. Vol. 1. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. 1988 "An overview of cognitive grammar", in: Rudzka-Ostyn (ed.), 3^48. 1990a "Subjectification", Cognitive Linguistics 1(1): 5-38. 1990b Concept, image, and symbol: The cognitive basis of grammar. (Cognitive Linguistics Research 1.) Berlin-New York: Mouton de Gruyter. 1991 Foundations of cognitive grammar. Vol. 2. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Lindner, Susan 1981 A lexico-semantic analysis of English verb-particle constructions with UP and OUT. [Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, San Diego.] Manney, Linda 1993 Middle voice in Modern Greek. [Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, San Diego.] Miller, George A.-Philip N. Johnson-Laird 1977 Language and perception. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Paprotte, Wolf-Rene Dirven (eds.) 1985 The ubiquity of metaphor: Metaphor in language and thought. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Pike, Kenneth L. 1967 Language in relation to a unified theory of the structure of human behavior. (2nd edition.) The Hague: Mouton. 1988 "Cultural relativism in relation to constraints on world view-an emic perspective", The Bulletin of History and Philology Academia Sinica 59(2): 385399. Rice, Sally Ann 1987 Towards a cognitive model of transitivity. [Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, San Diego.] Rubba, Johanna to appear "The interaction of folk models and syntax: Case choice after prepositional verbs of cognition in German", in: Eugene H. Casad (ed.), Cognitive linguistics in the Redwoods. Berlin-New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Rudzka-Ostyn, Brygida (ed.) 1988 Topics in cognitive linguistics. Amsterdam-Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

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Smith, Michael Brockman 1987 The semantics of dative and accusative in German: An investigation in cognitive grammar. [Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, San Diego.] Talmy, Leonard 1987 "Lexicalization patterns: Semantic structure in lexical forms", in: Timothy Shopen (ed.), Language typology and syntactic description. Part 3. Cambridge-New York: Cambridge University Press, 57-149. 1988 "The relation of grammar to cognition", in: Rudzka-Ostyn (ed.), 165-205. Taylor, John R. 1988 "Contrasting prepositional categories: English and Italian", in: Rudzka-Ostyn (ed.), 299-326. 1989 Linguistic categorization: Prototypes in linguistic theory. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Traugott, Elizabeth 1985 "Conditional markers", in: Haiman (ed.), 289-307. Tuggy, David 1981 The transitivity-related morphology of Tetelcingo Nahuatl: An exploration in space grammar. [Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, San Diego.] Vandeloise, Claude 1985 Description of space in French. [Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, San Diego. Reproduced by the Linguistic Agency, University of Duisburg, Series A, Paper 150.] to appear "Touching: A minimal transmission of energy", in: Eugene H. Casad (ed.), Cognitive linguistics in the Redwoods. Berlin-New York: Mouton de Gruyter. van Hoek, Karen Ann 1992 Paths through conceptual structure: Constraints on pronominal anaphora. [Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, San Diego.] to appear "A cognitive analysis of bound anaphora", in: Eugene H. Casad (ed.), Cognitive linguistics in the Redwoods. Berlin-New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Verhagen, Arie to appear "Sentential conceptualization and linear order", in: Eugene H. Casad (ed.), Cognitive linguistics in the Redwoods. Berlin-New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Wierzbicka, Anna 1985 " Oats' and 'wheat': The fallacy of arbitrariness", in: Haiman (ed.), 311-342.

Possession and possessive constructions Ronald W. Langacker

1. Introduction The linguistic category of possession is clearly both universal and fundamental. Possessives are found in every language, are of frequent occurrence, and serve a variety of grammatical functions. Yet in many respects they remain quite mysterious. Although the idea of possession would seem to be self-evident, an adequate semantic description of possessive relationships has proved elusive. An affinity between possession and such notions as location, existence, and perfect aspect is readily demonstrated empirically but resistant to satisfactory explanation. Equally recalcitrant is the common use of possessives to express the subject of a clause or nominalization. Our purpose here is to examine these issues from the perspective of cognitive grammar. Following a brief sketch of that framework, proposals will be offered concerning both the semantic characterization of possession and the analysis of various possessive constructions.

2. Some fundamentals of cognitive grammar The theory of cognitive grammar offers naturalness, conceptual unification, and theoretical austerity.1 Reflecting the semiological function of language—to allow the symbolization of conceptualizations by means of phonological sequences-it posits only semantic structures, phonological structures, and symbolic structures (form-meaning pairings). Lexicon and grammar are seen as forming a continuum whose proper characterization comprises only symbolic structures. It follows that all grammatical elements are attributed some kind of conceptual import (though it may be abstract, redundant, or tenuous). Whether lexical or grammatical, a symbolic element is often polysemous: it has not just one meaning but a family of related senses, usually clustered around a prototype. Some of these senses are schematic relative to others, representing the abstract

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commonality inherent in certain more specific values. There is no reason to assume, however, that a lexical or grammatical element invariably includes among its senses a highly schematic value with respect to which all of its other senses constitute instantiations (elaborations).2 Meaning is a conceptual phenomenon (in the broadest sense). Any aspect of mental experience has the potential to be invoked as part of the meaning of a linguistic element or expression. The conceptions that serve in this manner-referred to as cognitive domains-can occupy any position along the parameters of complexity and abstractness.3 They range from such basic notions as the experience of time, color, and spatial extensionality, at one extreme, to higher-order concepts, conceptual complexes, and even entire knowledge systems, at the other. Cognitive domains also run the gamut from rich, detailed conceptualizations to the highly abstract image Schemas (e. g., container-content; source-path-goal; center-periphery; force) hypothesized by Lakoff (1987) and Johnson (1987) as being fundamental to cognitive structure and development. Fundamental in another sense are certain complex notions, intermediate in level of specificity, that are so ubiquitous in our experience and so obviously important both linguistically and cognitively that the term conceptual archetype is perhaps not inappropriate: our (schematized) conception of a human face; of the human body as a whole; of discrete physical objects; of canonical transitive events (agent-patient interactions); of a face-to-face verbal exchange; of using an instrument to affect another entity; and so on. Image Schemas and conceptual archetypes are each essential to cognition and linguistic structure. I believe (counter to Lakoff and Johnson) that image Schemas are best thought of as reflecting innate cognitive abilities essential for the emergence of any kind of structured mental experience. Some conceptual archetypes may also have an innate basis, but they are strongly shaped by experience and incorporate substantial conceptual content representing the commonality inherent in countless everyday bodily experiences made possible by image-schematic abilities. Moreover, certain image Schemas and conceptual archetypes bear special relationships to one another. Corresponding to the conceptual archetype of physical motion through space, for instance, are more abstract kinds of motion that essentially reduce to mental scanning (Langacker 1986b). Corresponding to the archetypal conception of a physical container and its contents is the abstract, image-schematic conception (applicable to any domain) of an inclusion relationship (cf. Langacker 1987a: section 6.2).

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At least in initial stages of learning and thought, the Schemas presumably cannot be manifested in isolation, but only within the complex archetypes they structure and allow to emerge experientially. At later stages of cognitive development, they are manifested in progressively more rarified bodies of conceptual content, and perhaps ultimately we can manipulate them directly (in certain kinds of abstract thought). Linguistically, I suggest that image Schemas and conceptual archetypes combine to account for the universality and significance of certain fundamental linguistic notions, the former affording a schematic characterization applicable to all instances, and the latter serving to characterize the prototype. For example, I believe that every noun designates a region (or thing), defined abstractly as a set of interconnected entities, whose construal as such reflects the image-schematic ability of conceptual reification. The archetypal conception of a physical object provides the category prototype. Similarly, a subject is prototypically an agent, an archetypal semantic role, but if there is anything that all subjects have in common— and I believe there is—the commonality must be highly abstract: I analyze it in terms of our ability to impose figure/ground organization on a conceived situation. A comparable two-level characterization will be offered for possession. A linguistic expression's meaning involves not only conceptual "content" but also a particular way of construing that content. Numerous aspects of construal can be discerned, including the level of specificity at which a situation is characterized; perspective (e.g., vantage point, orientation, and the direction of mental scanning); scope (the array of conceptual content actually invoked); the construal of one structure against the background provided by another (consider metaphor, presupposition, and discourse phenomena); and various kinds of prominence. Two kinds of prominence are especially significant for grammatical purposes. First, every expression profiles (i. e., designates) some substructure within its scope. The noun intermission, for example, evokes as its base the schematic conception of a performance, and within that base it profiles a scheduled pause. An expression profiles either a thing or a relationship,4 the nature of its profile determining its basic grammatical class. Thus a nominal expression (e. g., a noun, pronoun, or noun phrase) designates a thing, whereas a relational profile is characteristic of classes such as verbs, adverbs, adjectives, and prepositions. Relational expressions usually exhibit a second kind of prominence pertaining to their participants: one participant-termed the trajector- stands out as the pri-

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mary figure within the profiled relationship; there may also be a secondary figure, referred to as a landmark (see Langacker 1991, chapter 7). The semantic contrast between above and below, for example, resides in whether the trajector is identified with the higher of two entities aligned along the vertical axis, or with the lower. Abbreviatory notations for the basic grammatical classes are given in Figure 1 (observe that heavy lines indicate profiling). A thing is conveniently represented by a circle, and a relationship by a dashed line connecting the relational participants, notably the trajector (tr) and landmark (1m). A verb is claimed to profile a process, characterized as a relationship followed sequentially in its evolution through time; indicating this sequential scanning is the heavy-line portion of the time arrow. Evolution through time figures less saliently in the relationships profiled by adverbs, adjectives, and prepositions, which are consequently said to be atemporal.5 (a) thing

ο

(b) oiemporal relation

οι

(c) process

storm V

Remote |

s

Dominant

^

Storm

Anger

Birds

/

L_

People < Close

r

Recessive

Figure 10. Dominant and recessive metaphors

rather than zooming in toward the analytical outlook required of an abstraction. The recessive metaphor is imbued with art and poetry as the Kaluli express their identification of people with birds in elaborate dress and with the dead through the songs. Perhaps the recessive metaphor is composed in contradistinction to societal life on the terrestrial surface, whereas the dominant metaphor is not formed in contrast to another realm. 4.7 Denotation and connotation Denotation is a clear concept, and customarily it warrants a section in major overviews of semantics (e.g., Lyons 1977: 206-215; Russell 1974). But connotation is a catch-all term for many kinds of semantic nuance, which invites fewer and briefer treatments (e. g., Ullmann 1972: 355-357; Palmer 1981: 89-93). Connotative differences reside in distinct idealizations, as in baby versus infant; they concern positive and negative registers, as in statesman versus politician; they derive from associated scenarios, as pill versus tablet became contrastive after the advent of birthcontrol pills; they consist of frames that occasion relexification after becoming negative, as bane became poison, X-rated became NC17, crippled became handicapped which, in turn, became disabled; they involve a welter of emotive overtones, and much more. Lyons notes that J. S. Mill, who coined the denotative versus connotative distinction, altered his characterization throughout his writings. The following discussion explores the capacity of vantage theory to model delicate shades of meaning. The example draws from Stanlaw's (1987) extensive investigation of connotation among Japanese color

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terms. Stanlaw used Berlin and Kay's original Munsell method to find that Japanese speakers name each of 36 color categories with both a native term and a loan term from English. Adopting "an extended feature theory of word meaning", he subjected 80 native judges to two variants of Osgood's "semantic differential test" to delineate the distinct senses of the paired color terms. Stanlaw's Munsell measurements produced observations that parallel those of the Mesoamerican survey: 1. Derived terms name areas between the unique hues, such as brown, purple, pink, and orange 2. Foci are pulled off center along the brightness dimension of light-dark 3. The foci of loan words are lighter and foci of native words darker 4. Although Stanlaw does not use the terminology of vantage theory, the word pairs name categories coextensively. However, Stanlaw found that 5. Japanese consultants associated the darker, broader native terms with things traditional, artistic, and cultured while they associated the lighter, narrower loan words with things modern and new; in practice, they chose each word of a dominant-recessive pair according to context, as murasaki would name the purple thread of a kimono while paapuru would name purple in a television commercial 6. On an emotive level, men thought that the loan words were "clever" while women thought they were "silly". Murasafcl Paapuru Dominant Vantage

Recessive Vantage

Purple — —

Similarity.

Similarity Dlstinctlveness Dark. Traditional-——

Dark Light A Modem

Mobile Coordinates

Fixed Coordinates

Mobile Coordinates

Figure 11. Japanese vantages on the purple category showing a continuum between denotative and connotative meanings as they are established by coordinates at higher and lower levels of concentration (based on Stanlaw's 1987 extended features)

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In Figure 11, the hierarchy of meanings pertaining to murasaki and paapuru are diagrammed as zooming in through levels of increasing specificity within a pair of coextensive vantages. 1. The features "traditional/modern" and "clever/silly" are treated in the same way as are the coordinates of any vantage in the universalist model of color categorization; the universal coordinates are the reference points of the maximally purple hue and the emphases on similarity and distinctiveness; dark and light are widely used 2. The potential for adding lower-level coordinates, replacing them, or removing them is open-ended 3. Different features are part and parcel of different points of view and, therefore, the nonsynonymous coextensive terms are used to name the same color in different contexts 4. Nuances of meaning become increasingly subjective, subtle, and culture-specific at depths of the hierarchies. First and top-most is the perception of strong purple, a neural reflex. Second down are the universal cognitive emphases on similarity and distinctiveness, which further determine category width. Third are dark and light, which are open to a number of symbolic associations (Izutsu 1972). Fourth are the culture-bound values of traditional and modern. Fifth is the socially governed gender difference in emotional response. The hierarchic descent marks no divide between denotation and connotation, but places extremes of denotation and connotation at opposite ends of a cline. 4.8 Prosaic and poetic A dominant coextensive term may be more appropriate for ordinary, functional, or even depreciative usage while the recessive term appears more in literature, poetry, aesthetic and delicate expression, or politeness. (Japanese native and foreign color-term pairs may seem to suggest a counterexample; however, the recessive loan words are linked with newness.) Forbes (1979: Figures 1 and 2) describes a coextensive relation in French of marron and brun (although she does not name their relation); marron is probably dominant because it covers more Munsell colors, whereas the focus of brun is polarized in consistency with a recessive view. French speakers most often apply dominant marron to eyes, clothes, trees, and food; they apply recessive brun to hair, paint, human skin (race?), and an animal's coat. But they switch to dominant marron to purvey the indelicate, as in un enorme rat marron.

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5. Summary Vantage theory originated as a model of color categorization. It may apply to cognition in other domains of language and culture. The theory holds that a category is an analogy between the fixed and mobile coordinates in physical space and other sensations and cognitions. Both in physical terrain and solely in thought, the intersection of coordinates composes a point of view. From such a mental vantage, people create, maintain, and change a category in an effort to comprehend the world amidst its predictable aspects as well as the novelty that it presents. They change their view by altering mobile coordinates and by rearranging or replacing fixed coordinates. They may also refine a vantage by zooming in, which they accomplish by converting a mobile coordinate to fixed status and adding a new mobile coordinate, or they widen it by zooming out in the reverse manner. This restricting and dilating of a category is also achieved by analogy to behavior in space. Vantage theory predicts that coextensive ranges will manifest the dominant-recessive pattern and that the relation between vantages will evolve through a continuum marked at points by near-synonymy, coextension, inclusion, and complementation. Although the evolution may begin at any point at which a second vantage of a category is constructed, subsequent developments will adhere to the order. The two vantages need not be separately named but, when they are, the semantic relation between terms will reflect the underlying phase of development. As the recessive vantage is at once internally inconsistent and analytical, it is given to greater indeterminacy and reflection or, at least, associated with the less usual. The worldwide statistical significance of the dominant-recessive pattern of coextension in color naming hints that people may construct categories, at least of color, by an innate method, although it would be odd if an inborn capacity were devoted to only one domain. The vantage model presents a specific hypothesis of this method and adds that categorization is as much an arrangement of coordinates as it is a selection of them and emphases among them. When people categorize, they are active agents inseparable from the viewpoints they so construct and name.5 Notes I. My fieldwork in Zulu was supported during 1991 by a grant for the invitation of an Overseas Research Fellow from the Institute for Research Development, Human Sciences Research Council, Pretoria, Republic of South Africa, solicited on my behalf by John R. Taylor.

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2. Shortly after arriving in Johannesburg, I conducted this interview with the cooperation of a Zulu watchman in the security compound at the University of the Witwatersrand through his limited English and my hastily acquired Zulu phrases. His terms are transcribed as I heard them. Some of his terms, e. g., kosazana, inamono, tsagatso, are not recorded in the standard Zulu dictionaries, and may be borrowings from non-Zulu languages and dialects. 3. Kay and McDaniel's (1978) fuzzy-set model of color categories expressed them as graded versions of theoretic sets; they sought to reconcile gradation with the notion that a category is a logical operation of either identity, union, intersection, or inclusion. The venture was prompted by prototype theory and by De Valois, Abramov and Jacob's (1966) finding in macaque monkeys of a modified neural analogue of Ewald Hering's nineteenth-century opponent-process model of the six elemental colors or perceptually irreducible primaries: unique red, yellow, green, and blue, and pure white and black. An identity contains one primary color at which its membership value is maximal while the values decrease in direct proportion to the extent that the color intergrades with neighboring primaries. A union contains two or three primaries with maximum membership at each, a half value between any two, and the category margins tailing down to zero membership at neighboring primaries; for example, the cool category is represented as a bimodal curve of fuzzy-set calculus, an intersection consists of the grading between primaries but not the primaries at maxima; an intersection, such as turquoise, cannot attain more than half the value of membership attained by the primaries. The fuzzy-set model shares all the problems of prototype theory, such as the inability to provide for change or to specify the role of the categorizer. It is based on the same functionalism and deterministic notion of the language-to-world relation. Its union operation predicts that foci of composite color categories will fall on unique hues, never between, but Rosch's foci of the Dani mili category in Figure 4 fall between green, blue, and black. It offers no account of coextension, such as that of the Zulu system in Figure 2. It supplies no insight into the dominant-recessive pattern of coextension or into the different behavior that typically accompanies each range of a coextensive pair, for example, the Zulu speaker's indeterminacy when naming and mapping recessive kosazana or people's tendency to name the recessive range with loanwords, rare words, local words, or words of a literary flavor. It cannot accommodate the continuum of nearsynonymy, coextension, inclusion, and complementation—including intermediate types in real behavior-or show how the types are linked to each other or explain how and why the continuum evolves. Space limitations prevent a full review, which, however, appears elsewhere (MacLaury in press: chapter 2). 4. Berlin (1992: Figure 5.1) adds (about five) choices to (1) Celeus spectabilis to bring its score in the histogram to an even level with the 23 choices originally assigned to (2) C. elegans by Berlin, Boster and O'Neil (1981: Figure 3). (Berlin [1992] scores Celeus spectabilis at 40 in his Table 5.5, which may be a typographical error.) The scores of the five other species retain their 1981 values. Berlin derives the 23 from a second score in Table 6 of the 1981 publication. He enters "modified and corrected" in the legend of his 1992 Figure 5.1. On the same page he writes The prototype of the generic taxon called sawake appears to be Celeus spectabilis, the rufous-headed woodpecker, although it is followed closely by C. elegans. All species of this genus are fairly similar in appearance. C. spectabilis is the most visually striking of the three species with a back covered profusely with small,

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black, heart-shaped spots. One of the synonymous names used to refer to it by splitters, apu sawake 'leader sawäke', is indicative of its perceptual salience. This chief of the woodpeckers is probably a quintessential prototype while the drabber but more frequently viewed C. elegans remains the representative prototype, along the line originally argued by Berlin, Boster and O'Neil (1981). It is critical that C. spectabilis is, in the minds of at least three Aguaruna, a member of the abutting category of large woodpeckers, tatasham, whereas C. elegans is not. In the words of Rosch and Mervis (1975: 602), "the more prototypical a category member, the more attributes it has in common with other members of the category and the less attributes in common with contrasting categories...!;] prototypes appear to be just those members of the category which most reflect the redundancy structure of the category as a whole", which renders C. spectabilis a poor candidate, at least, for the representative prototype. These woodpecker data never made an overwhelming case for the dominant-recessive pattern of coextension. Now with the various changes and reversals, they must be regarded as dubious support for any claim, be it Berlin's or mine. Throughout all, however, they have at least shown that some Aguaruna coextensively name the six woodpeckers. 5. Post Script. The foregoing, written in 1992, treats vantage theory as it was then, save minor editing in late Winter of 1994. Hill and MacLaury (this volume) incorporates a few refinements, such as formulae and notions of inherency and a preferred level of concentration, added to the theory in Spring. In Summer, I further mathematicized vantage theory, clarified its constructs, changed "space" to "space-time", and expanded its capabilities during the final revision of the book on color categorization (MacLaury in press). But enough developments have accrued since Summer to justify a second book of the same title and general application as the present paper, to begin in 1995.

References Anderson, John M. 1973 "Maximi Planudis in memoriam", in: Ferenc Kiefer—Nicolas Ruwet (eds.), Generative grammar in Europe, Dordrecht: Reidel, 20-47. Baines, John 1985 "Color terminology and color classification: Ancient Egyptian color terminology and polychromy", American Anthropologist 87: 282-297. Barsalou, Lawrence W. 1987 "The instability of graded structure: Implications for the nature of concepts", in: Ulric Neisser (ed.), 101-140. 1993 "Flexibility, structure, and linguistic vagary in concepts: Manifestations of a compositional system of perceptual symbols", in: Alan F. Collins, Susan E. Gathercole, Martin A. Conway, and Peter E. Morris (eds.), Theories of Memory. Hove, UK, and Hillsdale, USA: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 29-101. [Reprinted 1994.] Barsalou, Lawrence W.-Daniel R. Sewell 1984 Constructing representations of categories from different points of view. (Emory Cognition Project, Report 2.) [Manuscript, Emory University, Atlanta, GA.] to appear Constructing categories from different points of view. [Unpublished manuscript, Department of Psychology, University of Chicago.]

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Berlin, Brent 1992 Ethnobiological classification: Principles of categorization of plants and animals in traditional societies. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Berlin, Brent-Elois Ann Berlin 1975 "Aguaruna color categories", American Ethnologist 2: 61-87. Berlin, Brent-James S. Boster-John P. O'Neil 1981 "The perceptual basis of ethnobiological classification: Evidence from Aguaruna Jivaro ornithology", Journal of Ethnobiology 1: 95-108. Berlin, Brent-Paul Kay 1969 Basic color terms: Their universality and evolution. Berkeley—Los Angeles: University of California Press. [1991] [2nd edition, with colour plate, new preface, and updated bibliography.] Bloomfield, Leonard 1933 Language. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Casad, Eugene H. 1989 Speaker vantagepoint and canonical event structure in Cora. (Series A, Paper 270.) Duisburg: Linguistic Agency University Duisburg (L. A. U. D.). Casad, Eugene H.-Ronald W. Langacker 1985 " 'Inside' and Outside' in Cora grammar", International Journal of American Linguistics 51: 247-281. Cuyckens, Hubert 1984 "Prototypes in lexical semantics: An evaluation", in: Herwig Krenn-Jürgen Niemeyer—Ulrich Eberhardt (eds.), Sprache und Text. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 174-182. D'Andrade, Roy-M. Egan 1974 "The colors of emotion", American Ethnologist 1: 49-63. DeLancey, Scott 1981 "An interpretation of split ergativity and related patterns", Language 57: 626657. De Valois, Russell L.-Israel Abramov-Gerald H. Jacobs 1966 "Analysis of response patterns in LGN cells", Journal of the Optical Society of America 56: 966-977. Douglas, Mary 1966 Purity and danger: An analysis of the concepts of pollution and taboo. London—New York: Routledge. Dray, Nancy L. 1987 Doubles and modifiers in English. [Unpublished Master's thesis in linguistics, University of Chicago.] Feld, Steven 1982 Sound and sentiment: Birds, weeping, poetics and song in Kaluli expression, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Forbes, Isabel 1979 "The terms brun and marron in modern standard French", Journal of Linguistics 15: 295-305. Geeraerts, Dirk 1989 "Prospects and problems of prototype theory", Linguistics 27: 600-612. Hage, Per-Kristen Hawkes 1975 "Binumarien color categories", Ethnology 24: 287-300.

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Hage, Per-Wick Miller 1976 " 'Eagle' = 'bird': A note on the structure and evolution of Shoshoni ethnoornithological nomenclature. American Ethnologist 3: 481^1-88. Heider, Eleanor Rosch 1972 "Probabilities, sampling, and ethnographic method: The case of Dani color names", Man 7: 448-466. Hollins, Mark-Elizabath K. Kelley 1988 "Spatial updating in blind and sighted people", Perception and Psychophysics 43: 380-388. Hunn, Eugene 1975 Cognitive processes in folk ornithology: The identification of gulls. (Working Papers of the Language Behavior Research Laboratory 42.) Berkeley: University of California at Berkeley. Intons-Peterson, Margaret-Beverly B. Roskos-Ewaldsen 1989 "Sensory-perceptual qualities of images", Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition 15: 188-199. Izutsu, Toshihiko 1972 "The elimination of color in Far Eastern art and philosophy", Eranos 41: 429-464. Johnson, Mark 1987 The body in the mind: The bodily basis of meaning, imagination, and reason. Chicago-London: University of Chicago Press. Kay, Paul 1975 "Synchronic variability and diachronic change in basic color terms", Journal of Language in Society 4: 257-270. 1977 "Language evolution and speech style, in: Ben G. Blount-Mary Sanchez (eds.), Variability and change: Sociocultural dimensions of language change. New York: Academic Press, 21-33. Kay, Paul-Chad K. McDaniel 1978 "The linguistic significance of basic color terms", Language 54: 610-646. Kay, Paul-Bernt Berlin-William R. Merrifield 1991a "Biocultural implications of systems of color naming", Linguistic Anthropology 1: 12-25. 1991b The world color survey. (Microfiche.) Dallas. International Bookstore. Kövecses, Zoltan 1986 Metaphors of anger, pride, and love. Amsterdam-New York: John Benjamins. Lakoff, George 1982 Categories and cognitive models. (Cognitive Science Report 2.) Berkeley: Institute for Cognitive Studies, University of California, Berkeley. 1987 Women, fire, and dangerous things: What categories reveal about the mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1990 "The invariance hypothesis: Is abstract reasoning based on image-schemas?", Cognitive Linguistics 1: 39-74. Lakoff, George-Mark Johnson 1980 Metaphors we live by. Chicago-London: University of Chicago Press. Langacker, Ronald W. 1987 Foundations of cognitive grammar. Vol 1. Stanford: Stanford University Press. 1988 "A usage-based model", in: Brygida Rudzka-Ostyn (ed.), Topics in cognitive linguistics. Amsterdam—Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 127-161.

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Lehrer, Adrienne 1990 "Prototype theory and its implications for lexical analysis", in: Savas L. Tsohatzidis (ed.), 368-381. Lyons, John 1977 Semantics. Vols 1-2. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. MacLaury, Robert E. 1986 Color in Mesoamerica. Vol. 1. (Ph.D. dissertation in anthropology, University of California at Berkeley.) University Microfilms International, Number 8718073. 1987a "Color-category evolution and Shuswap yellow-with-green", American Anthropologist 89: 107-124. 1987b "Coextensive semantic ranges: Different names for distinct vantages of one category", Papers from the twenty-third annual regional meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society 1: 268-282. 199la "Social and cognitive motivations of change: Measuring variability in color semantics", Language 67: 34-62. 1991b "Prototypes revisited", Annual Review of Anthropology 20: 55-74. 1992 "From brightness to hue: An explanatory model of color-category evolution", Current Anthropology 33: 137-186. in press Color and cognition in Mesoamerican languages: Constructing categories as vantages. Austin: University of Texas Press. to appear a. "The universal pattern of coextensive color naming: Cateogizing by analogy to points of view in space". [Submitted to Behavioral and Brain Sciences.] to appear b. Zulu color categorization. [Unpublished manuscript.] Marmor, Gloria Strause 1978 "Age at onset of blindness and the development of the semantics of color names", Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 25: 267-278. Medin, Douglas L. —Edward E. Smith 1984 "Concepts and concept formation", Annual Review of Psychology 35: 113-138. Mervis, Carolyn B.-Eleanor Rosch 1981 "Categorization of natural objects", Annual Review of Psychology32: 89-115. Neisser, Ulric (ed.) 1987 Concepts and conceptual development: Ecological and intellectual factors in categorization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Osherson, Daniel—Edward E. Smith 1981 "On the adequacy of prototype theory as a theory of concepts", Cognition 9: 35-58. Palmer, Frank Robert 1981 Semantics. (2nd edition.) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Palmer, Stephen-Eleanor Rosch-Paul Chase 1981 "Canonical perspective and the perception of objects", in: John B. LongAlan D. Baddeley (eds.), Attention and performance. Vol. 9. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 135-151. Rips, Lance J. 1975 "Inductive judgements about natural categories", Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior 14: 665-681. Rivers, W. H. R. 1902 "The color vision of the Eskimo", Proceedings of the Cambridge Philosophical Society 11: 143-149.

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The terror of Montezuma: Aztec history, vantage theory, and the category of "person" Jane H. Hill—Robert E. MacLaury

1. Introduction: The category of the person The proper anthropological understanding of 'persons'-human beings considered as "psycho-socio-biological individuals" (Spiro 1993: 117)-is today the site of intense debate. Universalists (e.g., Spiro 1993) argue that people in every society must understand personhood in essentially the same way. Relativists, suggests Spiro, miss evidence for cross-cultural regularities by essentializing local ethnopsychological stereotypes, failing to explore variation and change. Relativists (e.g., Sh weder-Bourne 1984) argue that universalists neglect the complexity of local context and provide no place for the dialogic relationship between individual and culture. Vantage theory (MacLaury 1987, 1991b, 1992) opens a way out of this impasse. The model provides a formal account of categories of the person that uses a small universal set of dimensions, yet permits incorporation of the local understandings and choices of interested human actors. We present an account of person categories in terms of vantage theory through analysis of the textual representation of rulers in Aztec historical chronicles in the sixteenth century. This material does not, of course, reveal the full potential of Aztec ethnopsychological thought. The chroniclers aimed to sequence and detail major historical events, and to assert the place of the Aztecs themselves within universal history. They focus on the deeds of actors in these events, not on feelings and motives. Thus Aztec histories yield data on habitual and unreflecting (albeit elite) modes of understanding of persons. The problem that stimulates our analysis is an innovation in the understanding of persons manifest in the representation of Montezuma, ruler of Tenochtitlan, in Book XII of the Florentine Codex (Sahagun 1975; referred to hereafter as simply "Book XII"). Book XII is a history in Nahuatl of the Spanish conquest of Mexico. Compiled by the great Franciscan student of Aztec culture, Fray Bernardino de Sahagun, with the

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aid of Aztec assistants, the history incorporates narratives by men who fought with the Aztec armies. Leon-Portilla emphasizes that the narrative structures and themes of Book XII "seem to stem from ancient forms of pre-Hispanic oral tradition" (Leon-Portilla 1974: 247).' While this is surely the case, Book XII is particularly revealing about the evolution of Aztec thought in the colonial period. It was created in the mid-sixteenth century by Aztec narrators who were in intensive contact with Spaniards and who sought, together with Sahagun and his assistants, to make meaning from chaos in the aftermath of conquest. One of the most dramatic and compelling themes in Book XII develops the terror and indecision of Moteuczömä Xöcöyotzm 'Montezuma the Younger', Tenochtitlan tlahtoäni, 'ruler of Tenochtitlan'.2 In 1519 he was the most powerful lord in Mexico. Uniquely, the narrators of Book XII focused on the great ruler's inner feelings and motives. Montezuma is portrayed as distinctive from other rulers because of states located "inside" his body. What led to this unprecedented representation? We argue that post-conquest chaos in Aztec society encouraged elaboration of the person category, which was constituted in reference to a pair of coordinates. One point of reference was attention to similarity, and the other was attention to difference. As society broke down, the former emphasis weakened while the latter gained strength. An analytical "recessive" vantage on the category of person was innovated as an alternative to the original and "dominant" view of persons as stereotyped by role. The alternative regarded people individually. We link details of both form and content of the portrait of Montezuma in Book XII to the predictions of our vantage theory model. We first briefly introduce vantage theory, using the familiar domain of color categorization. We then sketch our approach to person categories. We exemplify the approach with a full analysis of an Aztec person category manifested in the representations of rulers in sixteenth-century Aztec chronicles written in the Nahuatl language, focusing on the innovative portrait of Montezuma in Book XII of the Florentine Codex. Finally, we summarize the implications of our approach.

2. Vantage theory: Color categories Vantage theory emerged in research on color terminology within the framework originated by Berlin and Kay (1969), and is easily understood in reference to examples from this domain.3 In particular, vantage theory

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solves certain problems in the fuzzy-set interpretation of color categorizations (Kay—McDaniel 1978). First, this interpretation lacks any explanation for change, even though the unidirectional evolution of color-category systems was a central claim of Berlin and Kay's (1969) work. 4 Second, the fuzzy-set interpretation provides an inadequate account of variation. Kay (1975) pointed out that color-terminology systems vary synchronically among speakers of single languages. Such variation is taken by fuzzy-set theorists to manifest the expected "noise" in probabilistic categorization. Subsequent findings show this account to be unsatisfactory. While the tendency of speakers cross-culturally to center color categories on universal "focal colors" was an important finding of Berlin and Kay (1969), some speakers "float" their preferred focal colors at a considerable distance from the expected unique hue points, and firmly insist upon this deviation. Further, such "polarized" foci are closely associated with other phenomena. The focus that is most distant from the expected unique hue is associated with the smaller of two extensional ranges when a speaker uses two terms with almost fully overlapping meanings. These coextensive patterns exhibit high statistical significance, such that understanding them as "random noise" is problematic (MacLaury 1987, to appear). Coextension will be discussed in more detail below.5 MacLaury (1986, 1987, 1991b, in press, and in this volume) proposes that these results can be handled if the category named by a color term is considered as a collection of coordinates and the selective emphases on them. Human beings understand and organize their experiences of color by assuming a personal point of view or "vantage" which orders these coordinates and emphases into an arrangement. This vantage is constructed in the same way that people locate themselves in physical space, in terms of a limited selection from among the available coordinates. At least one will be a fixed coordinate and one will be mobile (these can be taken as "ground" and "figure" respectively, in the sense of cognitive grammar [Langacker 1987]). While speakers behave as if they were locating themselves in a space when they construct a vantage, the model does not entail that they literally envision themselves as standing in an imaginary field of graded hue, but that they keep track of categories in the same way that they keep track of locations in space, in reference to things that are fixed or backgrounded and things that are moving or, at least, profiled in high relief as if movable. Thus, like other processes of abstract thought, categorization is based on an analogy which equates mentally

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manipulable percepts, images, and cognitions with the physical points of reference and the velocities that serve as coordinates for any creature that must keep track of its position in space and time.6 Figure 1 models the color category "warm". Any vantage on "warm" requires the selection of two fixed perceptual coordinates, the hues red and yellow, accounted for in neurophysiological terms. The second pair of coordinates are two mutable cognitions, selected from a continuum of attention to similarity and attention to distinct!veness. Emphases along this axis are reciprocal: the more speakers emphasize distinctiveness, the less they note similarity, although neither can be entirely ignored. In the warm category, a large "composite" color category, the emphasis is on similarity. A vantage on the warm category determines the arrangement of the coordinates. First, coordinates assume fixed or mobile statuses. Second, two coordinates appear at the most preferred level of concentration. By "level of concentration", we refer to the fact that in imagining a category, a speaker can "zoom in" or "pan out" on this system of coordinates. "Zooming in" shifts a mobile coordinate to a "fixed" status as ground, while adding a new mobile coordinate as figure; "panning out" reverses this process. The most preferred level of attention is "panned out", in contrast to the kind of fine-grained and finicky attention required to "zoom in". The category, however, formally includes all levels as presuppositions and as potential sites of concentration. Indicated on the left side of Figure 1 are formulaic expressions for the cognitions at each of the three levels of concentration, in order of preference. Within the box, the process of "zooming in", whereby mobile coorLevels of Concentration

Fixed Coordinates

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1 RS = S

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Key: Red Unique or purest red Yellow Unique yellow

Zoom-in

Figure L A model of the warm category as entailments of a point of view constructed in reference to coordinates

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dinates shift to a new status as fixed, is modeled. At the right are brief statements of the entailments-the actual behaviors that a speaker will manifest-of each level of concentration (we use this shorthand notation in our discussion of person categories as well). At our first level unique red is the fixed coordinate;7 the mobile coordinate is similarity. At this most preferred level of concentration, the choice of a best example is backgrounded and thereby default, and so is placed around unique red. The entailment "breadth of range" occurs because a speaker who is foregrounding attention to similarity will reach out to include as many examples as possible in the category centered on unique red. At the second level of concentration, the attention to similarity shifts to a new position as fixed coordinate or ground, replacing unique red, which assumes the status of a presupposition. A new hue, yellow, appears as mobile coordinate, becoming the center of attention against the backdrop of its similarity to unique red. Once yellow has been selected, the "warm" category is entailed.8 At this point, we can clarify the shorthand expressions for the cognitions at the three levels of concentration. The expression "SY" is read as: "(at this level) attention to similarity is the fixed coordinate and the hue yellow is the mobile coordinate". At the right of the equal sign is the expression "S2". This is read as: "attention to similarity is doubled at this level". That is, attention to similarity has now appeared twice as a coordinate in the warm category, with a multiplicative effect.9 On the third level, yellow appears as the fixed coordinate or ground, and attention to distinctiveness emerges as a new mobile coordinate, becoming the new center of concentration in this most-detailed level (YD). At this level, the attention to the distinctiveness guarantees that the warm category will be prevented from extending beyond yellow throughout the color domain. Note that the attention to similarity, required for construction of the composite warm category, must still be "in the back of the mind", even though attention to distinctiveness is foregrounded. The strength of this "background" against which distinctiveness is given attention is shown by the expression "S2-D". Even though attention to distinctiveness is foregrounded at this finest level of the zoom in, it is not multiplied, since it appears only once as a coordinate in this arrangement. Figure 2 shows a coextensive organization of the warm category. We illustrate coextension in detail, because we will argue that coextensive person categories are attested in the representations in Book XII of the Florentine Codex. Coextension is a relational type (see note 5) that sometimes appears when speakers split a composite category into basic cate-

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E ntai Intents Broad Central Focus Even Distribution Frequent Naming Stabilitg

Υ

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3. R D = S 2 - D

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Figure 2. A model of the warm category as the entailments of two viewpoints constructed in reference of opposite arrangements of one set of coordinates

gories-in this case, "warm" is splitting into the basic categories red and yellow. A coextensive category has two vantages, dominant and recessive, each labeled with a distinct term. The dominant vantage is modeled in the left-hand box, focused for purposes of illustration in reference to yellow. Yellow is the fixed coordinate and attention to similarity is the mobile coordinate. Since attention to similarity contracts perceived distance between stimuli, this range will be broad (the speaker will name many colors with this term). Its focus will be centrally placed so as to evenly and equally represent colors of the category. Further, attention to similarity at the most preferred level of concentration entails the fact that this dominant vantage is relatively stable for the speaker; that is, the speaker can reproduce the same distribution and focus over many trials. As the level of concentration zooms in, red appears as the mobile coordinate. That is, this dominant vantage still has the properties of "warm". At the finest zoom-in, red shifts to the fixed coordinate and attention to distinctiveness, the mobile coordinate, limits the range. At the dominant range, similarity makes a double contribution on two levels of concentration, as expressed by the superscript in "S2" in the expressions for the second and third levels of concentration. The recessive vantage, shown in the right-hand box of Figure 3, is focused in red, which appears as the fixed coordinate at the most preferred level of concentration. Here, in contrast to the warm category in Figure 1, or to the dominant vantage in Figure 2, attention to distinctiveness appears as the mobile coordinate at the preferred level of concentration. The behavioral entailment of this attention is that the recessive viewpoint will be narrow, with few colors named with the special "red" term. At the second level, attention to distinctiveness shifts to a new position as

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fixed coordinate, with the same multiplicative effect seen for attention to similarity in the dominant range. The double attention to distinctiveness in this viewpoint (expressed by D2) may force its focus away from the category center near unique red into a polarized position, off the main axis that connects red and yellow in the Munsell array. The foregrounded attention to distinctiveness also restricts the size of this range. Should a speaker zoom in on this category, yellow appears as the mobile coordinate, but at less preferred levels of attention. Even though attention to similarity appears at the finest level of the zoom, it is outweighed by the doubled attention to distinctiveness centered on red, so that few examples of potential "yellow" may be admitted, and their admission may be rather unstable and indeterminate for the speaker, as expressed in the statement of entailments. Understanding of the formalism may be helped by imagining the behavior of a speaker with a coextensively named category like that shown in Figure 2 in a color-survey interview. In the first step of the interview, the speaker is presented with the 330 loose chips of the Munsell color array, one by one, in random order, and is asked to name each separately (Precedure I: "naming range"). In coextension, rerandomization of the naming responses to chips into a format of the rows and columns of the Munsell chart will yield a peculiarly chaotic distribution of two labels, overlapping across the same regions of the Munsell array and often looking like a checkerboard.10 In the second procedure of the interview, "focus", the speaker is asked to choose a focus from a derandomized array of chips for each name she volunteered in Procedure I. Even where the naming range of two terms overlaps extensively, the speaker may locate their foci quite far apart. Finally, the speaker is asked to put a grain of rice on every color of the array that she is willing to include under each name. She maps each name separately and independently of other mappings (Procedure III: "mapping"). When the speaker stops mapping the range of a name, the results are recorded, and the request is repeated. Sometimes a consultant is willing to extend mapping through several such steps until she insists that no more colors can be included for that name. The consultant is likely to render the separate mappings of the two ranges step by step from opposite directions. She will map the dominant range in a few large steps, but will map the recessive range in many tiny steps, as she considers carefully what might be encompassed. The dominant range will be larger than the recessive range. All of these behaviors are diagnostic of coextension, and their significant association has been replicated in many languages around the world (MacLaury, to appear). A dominant range may be red-focused or yellow-focused; physiol-

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ogy does not determine the dominant-recessive pattern of coextension. These behaviors are modeled in Figure 2 as the "entailments" of the cognitive activity of assuming a coextensive pair of vantages on a category. 2.1 Vantage theory: Person categories Vantage theory purports to be a general model of categorization. In regard to the category of persons, it predicts that human actors think of experiences of persons in their diversity, and the distinctions between persons and nonpersons, in terms of coordinates, selective emphases on them, and arrangements of these. Heelas (1981) and Lock (1981) have suggested that the diverse types of person categories attested in the ethnographic record can be arranged in terms of at least two universal "dimensions", location and control.11 The location coordinates are "intrinsic' vs. "extrinsic". We relabel these coordinates as "inside" and "outside" respectively, to avoid the implication of necessity vs. accidence sometimes implied in those terms.12 This pair of coordinates derives from a human necessity, the perception of self vs. other, conceiver vs. environment. Following Hallo well (1971), Lock argues that any conceptual system must make this distinction. However, in any specific behavioral environment the self-other boundary may be fuzzy. Precisely where it is drawn is quite variable crossculturally. The local boundary is the reference point for the locations, which is fixed within any particular culture. Action, motivation, career trajectory, identity markers, or other characteristics of persons considered to be salient and relevant to social life, or that separate persons from nonpersons, may be located either outside or inside the boundary. People may construct distinct arrangements of these location coordinates, muting attention to the outside in favor of the inside, or vice versa. However, both locations are always perceptually available. For Heelas and Lock "control" indicates the site at which the capacity for a person's action is held to originate. The control dimension is perceptually necessary, since human beings must be able to distinguish between their own activity and passivity. Lock observes that while control is "through neurological reality located within the individual" (Lock 1981: 30), the characteristic symbol orientations of a culture (or, we suggest, of an individual in a particular context) may locate control in other persons, natural entities, or forces, causing persons to be thought of as "under control". The alternative symbolic orientation is to identify person and control abilities, constructing persons as "in control". We find these terms for the control dimension confusing in some contexts, so we have relabeled them as "controlled" and "autonomous". In our analysis of an Aztec person category, we treat the identification of persons as controlled

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or autonomous not as independent coordinates, but as entailments of the strengths of the attendances to similarity and distinctiveness respectively.13 Further, we transform "autonomous" in Mesoamerican ethnographic terms as "unpredicted" or "unpredictable", as the periphery of animals is to the controlled center of human habitation (see Figure 3). Our other coordinates for person categories are taken from the continuum of attention to similarity versus distinctiveness. These pertain to any category (Medin—Goldstone -Gentner 1990), and research on color categorization shows that shifts between these coordinates, probably driven by environmental changes experienced by speakers, are a principal engine of variation and change. Attention to similarity yields the assimilation of persons to timeless stereotyped roles (for example, the stereotyped representations of human types in early Egyptian tomb paintings (Weeks 1979]), and can entail the assimilation of nonhuman entities and artifacts to the category of persons (for example, Zapotec naming of hills as persons [MacLaury 1989: Figure 3]). Attention to distinctiveness is strong when persons are considered primarily as "unique individuals" (as in Roman portrait sculpture). Attention to distinctiveness can function also to restrict the scope of person categories to some subgroup of human beings, as when infants, women, or slaves are considered to be nonpersons. A superb example of fine-grained attention to distinctiveness was the determination by the United States Constitutional Convention of 1787 that each slave would count as exactly three-fifths of a "free Entail ments Social Stereotyped

s

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Figure 3. A model of the "person" category (Florentine Codex Book XII) as the entailments of two viewpoints constructed in reference of opposite arrangements of one set of coordinates

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person" for the purpose of enumerating the population of electoral districts. Once again, we emphasize that even though a particular speaker in a particular context may emphasize attention to one pole of the continuum, the other possibility is always available and can appear as the strongest coordinate should attention shift. Figure 3 models the Aztec person category that is required to account for the representations of rulers in Book XII of the Florentine Codex. We present it here in the abstract; the concrete realizations of the coordinates and their entailments in Aztec chronicles will be illustrated in section 3. The narrators of Book XII manifested their person category as a pair of coextensive vantages. The two vantages are opposite arrangements of the coordinates, which as a set constitute the single category of person. Yet the opposite arrangements do not constitute perfectly opposite points of view. They have different widths, degrees of acceptance, and association with the usual versus the exceptional or even the bizarre. The vantages are expressed in terms of abstract coordinates at three levels of concentration. Each level of concentration, expressed through zoom-in formulas, yields behavioral entailments. Categorizers accomplish these behaviors using locally pertinent symbolic material, which we sketch here only very briefly, pending more detailed exemplification below. The dominant vantage, shown on the left-hand side of Figure 3, yields all of the textual representations of rulers that we will consider below except the Book XII portrait of Montezuma. At the most preferred level of concentration, the fixed coordinate is outside location (O); the properties of persons to which categorizers attend unreflectingly are exterior to the local self-other boundary.14 The mobile coordinate is attention to similarity. The cognition of this level of concentration is expressed as OS = S (Ο stands for "outside" and S stands for "similarity"). The entailment is that candidate entities are recruited to personhood by reference to social stereotypes, triggered by external evidence (the Aztecs appealed to dress, speech, and other public acts considered to be characteristic of particular social roles). The second level of concentration zooms in, and attention to similarity shifts to ground. Inside location now appears as the figured or mobile coordinate. The cognition is expressed formulaicly as SI = S2 (I stands for "inside"). SI yields attention to those internal properties that link a person to human society. For the Aztecs these entailed principles of "control" and "orderliness" (as opposed to chaos).15 The controlling entities are a set of cosmic animistic forces projected into the bodily organs. Hence they are "inside" each living human being, as opposed to "outside" and public, although knowledge of their nature is available to divin-

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ers and other ritual adepts. These animistic forces were held to shape both moment-to-moment behavior and the trajectory of the life career. S2 expresses the multiplicative or doubled relation of S on level 2 with S on level 1. Hence similarity is particularly strong in this vantage. This entails the recruitment of as many examples as possible to this category and the specification of a highly stereotyped central exemplar of persons-this is, we will suggest below, the tlahtoäni, the ruler of each Aztec city-state. At the third, least preferred level of concentration, an extreme zoomin shifts the inside location to ground, with attention to distinctiveness as the mobile coordinate. The formula for the level is ID = S 2 -D (D stands for "distinctiveness"). Attention to distinctiveness distinguishes kings from other people and ensures some outer boundary for the person category, distinguishing human persons from, for instance, wild beasts (a point to which we will return below). One entailment of ID is that at this level of concentration categorizers can attend to those internal aspects of a person which might set him apart from the rest of society. Thus Aztec rulers could be distinguished from other persons by the fact that the force of the deity Tezcatlipoca resided within the ruler and spoke through his voice. Concentration at this level permitted healers and diviners to attent to distinctive maladjustments of the cosmic forces that might cause deviance or illness, and propose appropriate curative disciplines. S2-D expresses the fact that, while attention to distinctiveness (D) does occur in this vantage at the most fine-grained level of concentration, this is dominated by the twofold attention to similarity (S2). Thus, even as the distinctive properties of the ruler are attended to, this occurs against the very strong background of his likeness to other persons, his assimilation to orderly human society. The recessive vantage, modeled on the right side of Figure 3, is evidenced in the Aztec chronicles only in the representation of the ruler Montezuma in Book XII. At the most preferred level of concentration, the fixed coordinate or ground is inside location; the mobile coordinate is attention to distinctiveness. The entailments of this level of concentration, ID = D, are that persons are seen in their uniqueness, according to properties located inside the self-other boundary. Zooming in to the second level of concentration, expressed as DO = D2, attention to distinctiveness shifts to a position as fixed coordinate or ground, with outside location appearing as the mobile coordinate. Fleshing out the entailments of this level with local symbolic material, we find that the Aztec evaluated distinctive behavior manifested externally as alien and unpredictable, perhaps even "out of control", outside human order in the chaos of the

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periphery, more animal than human (especially, as we will see, in the case of the ruler). Difference was bad, and was understood as a disruption of the life trajectory, caused by loss or maladjustment of the controlling animistic entities. D2 indicates that attention to distinctiveness is doubled in this vantage, with the effect of sharply restricting the number of entities that can be recruited to the category, and with the effect also of polarization, the location of the best examples at as great a distance as possible from the central exemplars of the dominant vantage. Finally, at the most careful and least preferred focus of the zoom, expressed as OS = D2-S, outside location appears as the fixed coordinate and attention to similarity is the mobile coordinate. Here, the entailment is that categorizers will concentrate on external properties (speech, dress, behaviors) that are general among humans and define the outer limits of the person category. In the Aztec view, these are behaviors that are common, vulgar, and unlordly. D2-S expresses the fact that even though attention to similarity appears at this level, it is still dominated by attention to distinctiveness. That is, an individual included in this category might be seen as "like the common people", but against a background of deviance, such that the commonness itself is seen as an aberration.

3. Representations of "persons" in the Florentine Codex We turn now to textual exemplification of the coextensive Aztec person category sketched above. The Florentine Codex is our most important source on Aztec ethnopsychology, although the vision of human nature found there is probably idealized and conservative. Underpinning this vision is the dominant vantage shown in Figure 3. Attention to similarity against a ground of outside location (OS) entails the deemphasis of individual differences and favors conformity to a series of idealized roles. Nonconformity was recognized only as "bad" (a-cualli 'not-good'). Book X of the Codex, The People, contains a famous catalogue of "good" and "bad" stereotypes. For carpenters, it prescribes: The good (cualli) carpenter is one who uses the plumb; who is resourceful; who uses the cord, marks with lines... The bad (acualli) carpenter is one who breaks the work into pieces, who raises a clattering din; who is a nonchalant worker, a mocker; uncooperative, wasteful, squandering... (Sahagun 1961: 27)

Characteristically, this prescription attends to action and behavior, "outside", public properties of persons, for both "good" and "bad" exemplars. Especially for the nobility, external appearance was paramount and

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was highly stereotyped. Clothing and bodily ornament were regulated by sumptuary laws; the Florentine Codex devotes chapters to loving description of noble garments. That clothing was seen as "outside" in relation to the self-other boundary is evidenced by the fact that noble garments were clearly separate from the persons who might wear them. They were important tributary items, which might express the allegiance of a dominated province to the Aztec state. They could be exchanged between rulers as lavish expressions of alliance. Bodily movements, a public and external mode of expression, were stereotyped as well, and dancing was an indispensable art form, especially cultivated by high nobility. Rulers themselves often danced in public. In general, emotions are also considered as "outside" in this vantage: for the Aztec, these were in the main prescribed public manifestations. These manifestations were highly conventionalized, and were regulated by etiquette that specified when to laugh, shout, or weep. Speech as well was a public, conventional affair, a matter of the appropriate performance of a role. Book VI of the Codex, The Sayings of the Elders, (Sahagun 1969) lays down proper forms for public speech learned by young nobles during a rigid education in state-run schools. The Bancroft Dialogues (Karttunen-Lockhart 1987), a manual probably prepared to educate missionaries in polite Nahuatl speech, prescribes formulae for appropriate lordly courtesies between noble kin, stereotyped according to role (the mother, the younger brother, etc.), revealing that this prescriptive tradition persisted even in the late sixteenth century. What of the properties of persons that were located "inside" them, which could be attended to in the dominant vantage at the second, more exacting level of concentration (SI = S2)? Lopez Austin (1980) shows that the Aztecs saw human persons as points of convergence of cosmic forces that shaped, not only the behavior and life trajectory of human beings, but the organization of the entire universe. While these existed outside and beyond each human being, during life they permeated certain interior organs. The tönalli, a force derived from light and heat, determined fate and endowed human beings with varying types of temperament and degrees of vigor. This force derived from the day of birth (tönalli means "heat, day") and permeated the head and hair. A second animistic entity, ihiyotl, gave life-sustaining breath derived from the night wind. Located in life in the liver, this force shaped human passions. Most important for us here is the teyölia, an animating force that in life permeated the heart (yöllötl), governing thought and feeling and requiring regulation by moderation and penance. The teyölia of each human being lived on after

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death, residing in the appropriate afterworld (determined by the mode of death) after a brief period of earthly incorporeality. At the most fine-grained level of concentration, the extreme zoom-in to ID = S2-D, the pair of coordinates ID are modified by the presuppositional contexts of the more preferred levels (OS and SI). These cognitions entail the definition of persons in terms of stereotyped rules, and the assimilation of all persons to an orderly universe due to the permeation within their bodily organs of animistic entities deriving from cosmic sources. Thus, ID entails primarily vertical distinction within the social system: in the case at hand, those qualities which distinguish the ruler from other human beings. This contrasts sharply with ID in the recessive vantage, where, at the most-preferred level of concentration, the entailment is horizontal and yields attention to individuality, contextualized at level 2 as "peripheral, animal" in contrast to humanness. This contrast should make clear the effects of presuppositions (the more-preferred levels of concentration) as contexts which affect the entailments of coordinates. 3.1 The Aztec tlahtoäni 'ruler' During the last years before the Conquest the stratification of the Aztec society was intensifed, and nobles were strongly set apart from commoners (we can express this as an intensification of attention to distinctiveness resulting from zooming in within the dominant vantage: ID = S 2 —D). The highest rulers, called tlahtoäni, in turn were distinctive among nobles; in many public contexts, no one was permitted to look at the ruler's face. Only one tlahtoäni ruled in each city state. The lists of the rulers of the greatest cities were memorized by every noble child, and pages of the Florentine Codex and other documents enumerate their qualities. Most important, the rulers were war leaders.16 Says Book VIII of the Codex:17 (1)

In tlahtoäni tläcateuctli, motöcäyötia: Itequiuh catca in yäöyötl. (Sahagun 1954: 51)

'As for the ruler, lord of people was how he was named: As for his task, it was war.'

By this stereotype the ruler is exemplary of Aztec persons, since the role of warrior was shared by all.18

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The contrast between the "good ruler" and the "bad ruler" is set up in a special way. The good ruler is said to be like a bearer, carrying the state as a burden: (2)

tlamama, tecuexänoa temacochioa..., (Sahagun 1961: 15)

'He assumes burdens, he carries people in his cape; he bears people in his arms.'

The ruler prays that he should not let this burden fall: (3)

Quen mach nenti in önicätoyähuih in onictepehxihuih in macehuallft (Sahagun 1969: 43)

'What will happen if I should cast into the torrent, if I should cast from the crag the common people?'

The "crag, ... the torrent" is a metaphoric couplet standing for the wilderness, the earthly manifestation of the zone of chaos that lay everywhere on the periphery of the orderly human world. The Florentine Codex texts locate the ruler who turns against his subjects precisely in this inhuman and disordered wilderness (DO = D2). He is no longer a person at all. Instead he is the archetypical inhabitant of chaos, a wild beast, "with fangs, with claws". He is named tecuäni, literally "devourer of human beings". A passage in Book X details this vision: (4)

In tlahuelflöc tlahtoäni, tecuani tzitzimitl, cölelectli ocelot l, cuitlächtli. (Sahagun 1961: 15)

'The bad ruler is a maneater, a flying demon, a crawling demon19 an ocelot, a wolf.'

Lordly speech is an especially significant public and exterior sign of the ruler's nature. Rulers (with high war leaders and divinities) take the principal speaking parts in Aztec chronicles. Indeed, the tlahtoäni was the quintessential "speaker": the word is the agentive form of the Nahuatl verb tlahtoä "to speak". By being designated as "speakers', manifesting that property which distinguishes humans from animals, the rulers again appear as exemplary Aztec persons.20 But their speeches are stereotyped set pieces repeated in similar wording again and again throughout the surviving texts. Rarely are representations of the speech of rulers accompanied by explicit attention to feelings (other than lordly valor or piety expressed in the words of the speech themselves), and then only cursorily. The

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reason for this is that attention to any inner states requires, in the dominant vantage, a very fine zoom-in to ID. This least-preferred level of attention is unlikely to be sustained over a long sequence of textual material in Aztec histories, which are not primarily biographical, but attend to actors only insofar as they play a major role in some chronicled event. An excellent example is found in a pivotal episode of Alvarado Tezozomoc's Cronica mexicayotl [Chronicle of the Mexica] (1975 [c. 1609]). The Aztecs, crude barbarian newcomers, have secured the patronage of Achitometl, tlahtoäni of the Colhua Mexica, the most powerful state in the Valley of Mexico. As a token of his favor Achitometl gives the Aztecs his daughter, so that they may make her a goddess. But Huitzilopochtli, the War God, tells them that they must sacrifice the Colhua princess and dress a priest in her skin. The priests comply, and then invite Achitometl to sacrifice to the new divinity. Achitometl sacrifices quail and incenses the altar. He does not immediately see, through the smoke, the priest dressed in his daughter's flayed skin. Suddenly he recognizes what is before him: (5)

'Thus he saw the skin Inon mah quittac in ehuatl of a person, in ce tläcatl of his daughter, in ichpoch did Achitometl.21 in Achitometl Cencah ömomauhtih. He was very much startled. Niman ye Ic tzahtzi, Then therefore he cries out, he cries out to them, quintzahtzilia in Ttlahtöhcahuän. to his warriors, Ihuän in Imäcehualhuän and to his commoners quimilhuia: he says: Who are you, you Aquihqueh in amehhuän Colhuacans? Cölhuaquehe? Do you not see that they Cuix ahmö anquittah ca oquixipeuhqueh flayed my daughter? in nochpöchtzm? None of the evildoers will Ahmö nicän yezqueh in tlahuelllocqueh, remain here, We will kill them, tiquinmictlzqueh, we will destroy them, tiquinpohpolözqueh, here the evildoers will nicän tlämlzqueh in tlahuelllocqueh. end. And for that reason there Auh niman ye Ic was war. moyäötlah. (Alvarado Tezozomoc 1949: 57-58)

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For us, the poignancy lies in Achitometl's horror. But this moment is passed over in a brief zoom-in to the finest level of concentration of the dominant vantage, ID = S2-D, in the expression, cencah ömomauhtih 'he was very much startled'. The reflexive prefix, mo-, suggests that this state is conceptualized as located inside the self-other boundary. Attention to distinctiveness is almost certainly the mobile coordinate; Achitometl's horrible realization cannot have been regarded, even among the Aztecs, as an experience broadly shared among human beings. The chronicler, however, does not sustain this attention, but immediately pans out to the preferred level of concentration, OS, giving sustained attention to Achitometl's speech in a magnificent set piece in which the ruler addresses his warriors in stereotyped high language, opening with the rhetorical questions that occur repeatedly in lordly speeches, and closing with a typical call for the destruction of the enemy.22 A second example of a failure to sustain attention to feelings is found in the Anales de Cuauhtitlan [Annals of Cuauhtitlan], attributed to the chronicler Chimalpahin. Here, another Colhua tlahtoäni, Cocox, has offered to make the prince of Cuauhtitlan, Iztactototl, his heir. The prince scorns his offer, saying that the Colhua state will fall, and the Cuauhtitlan state is greater. The Colhua lord's reaction is represented as follows; we give only the first few lines of his long speech:

(6)

in öquicac cencah ic cualän ic moyöllitlacoh quihtoh: "Tlein quihtoa piltöntli cone t ön 11i? Tlä huel xictlahtlanicän tie in taltepeuh? In äquin techpehuaznequiz? Cuix amö nicän ca miquiztli? Quenin tixco tocpac ehuaz?..." (Lehmann 1938: 158)

'When he heard it, intensely he was thereby angered he was thereby insulted. He said, "What does he say, the little boy, the little child? Should you all perhaps ask him what our city will become? Who is he to vanquish us? Can it be that here there is no death? How shall he before us, upon us rise up?..."'

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Briefly concentrating at the least preferred level of the dominant vantage, ID, the chronicler notes the fury of the Colhua lord with two verbs. The first is cualän 'he was angry'. There is some evidence that this was a public, "outside" emotion, appropriate to rulers in many contexts. However the second verb, moyöllitlacoh 'he was insulted', displays the reflexive mo-, suggesting that this is conceptualized as an "inside" state. This state, further, is located in the heart, as evidenced by incorporated noun stem yöl- 'heart'. In contrast to this brief zoom-in to ID, the ruler's stereotyped speech, with its characteristic sequence of rhetorical questions and threats, is elaborate and sustained over many lines of text, strong evidence of panning out to the preferred level of concentration OS. 3.1.1 The portrait of Cuauhtemoc in Florentine Codex Book XII: A "traditional" representation of a tlahtoäni Other than Montezuma, Cuauhtemoc is the most important ruler represented in Book XII.23 Urging his people into battle against the Spaniards, Cuauhtemoc fulfills the warrior ideal. As with the portrayals of Achitometl and Cocox, the chroniclers' rhetorical strategies are grounded in attention to external properties of role performance. Appropriate to the representation of a ruler, Cuauhtemoc is given three speeches, in chapters 33, 38, and 41. The longest and most elegant (and eloquent testimonial to Aztec attention to costume as a major component of the externalized location of the socially-relevant qualities of persons) is Cuauhtemoc's call to battle in chapter 38. Hoping to terrify the Spaniards, he dresses his bravest warrior in a quetzal-owl battle dress that had belonged to the tlahtoäni Ahuitzotl: (7)

Quitoh in Cuäuhtemöctzm: " Tlahuizlli, Ttlahuiz catca in notechmhcauh in notahtzm Ahuitzotzm. Mä yehhuätl conitqui, mä ommiqui, ma contemahuizölti, mä tetlattiti, mä quittacän in toyäöhuän, mä quimahuizöcän." (Sahagun 1975: 117)

'Honored Cuauhtemoc said: "As for this garb, it was his garb, of my late ruler, of my father Revered Ahuitzotl. Let him wear it, Let him die with it on, May he inspire awe, May he be seen in it, May our enemies see him, May they marvel at it."'

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Cuauhtemoc gains most distinctiveness from other rulers through one poignant sentence in chapter 40. The passage describes the moment when the Aztec war leaders surrender: (8)

Auh in Cuäuhtemöctzm ttlan cah in Capitän. In quimolplliya quetzalichpetztli, tlatlahcohuitectli, huitzitzilin ihhuiyo imc ocuiltecayo. Omach catzähuac, zan qmxcahuitica. (Sahagun 1975: 123)

'And there was Honored Cuauhtemoc near the Captain. He was wrapped in a cape, of shining maguey fiber, each half of a color, of hummingbird feathers in the style of Ocuillan. It was very dirty, it was all that remained to him.'

Today, we long to know what Cuauhtemoc must have "felt", what sensations raged inside him at this dreadful moment. But the Nahuatl-speaking narrators choose a characteristic trope of exteriority: his costume. As we noted above, attention to the ruler's garb is common in Aztec historical chronicles. Painted and embroidered and feathered capes of fine fabrics and exotic weaves were key items of sumptuary display among the Aztec nobility, and, since they were received in tribute, signalled the devotion of a lord's followers and the loyalty of his allies. Here, however, the stereotyped rhetoric terminates in a new twist: his filthy cape, "all that remained to him", becomes a stunning symbol of Cuauhtemoc's defeat.24 This manifests attention to his distinctiveness, but through a reversal, pairing this attention with the ground of outside location (OD), rather than by a shift to the recessive vantage with its level-one cognition ID, or the second-level cognition DO. 5.7.2 The portrait of Montezuma: A distinctive representation of a tlahtoäni The representation of Montezuma in Book XII is organized largely according to the principles of the recessive vantage in Figure 3. Montezuma is differentiated from all other rulers through attention to his inner states. Montezuma's distinctness from other Aztec lords is shown in five ways: (1) Although as ruler he is above all a warrior, he refuses to attack the Spaniards. (2) The ruler is a "speaker", yet Montezuma is at a loss for words. (3) His inner states are elaborately represented. (4) His "inner" or "strategist" voice (Goffman 1974) is depicted, while in other texts only pub-

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lie speech is recounted. (5) The strategist voice uses colloquial language and rare conditional irrealis verbs. All except (1) are found in no other account of a Mexican ruler's deeds in any of the chronicles we have examined.25 Montezuma's refusal to make war on the Spaniards is reported by all sources. He is said to have tried to destroy them by mobilizing his allies and by invoking sorcery, but he forbade his own armies to attack. He is like a witch, not a warrior king (DO = D2). Book XII reports that Montezuma often wept. Many historians have taken this as evidence for his terror and confusion. However, it is unlikely that this weeping would have been understood by his people as evidence for any differentiated state of the ruler's mind. For the Aztecs, weeping was a public performance. Dignitaries often wept to show sincerity and seriousness. Cortez reported, in a letter to the King of Spain, how Montezuma and other assembled lords wept profusely during discussions of a peace treaty between the Spanish and the city of Texcoco (Cortes 1986 [1519-1520]: 99). The "sayings of the elders" in Florentine Codex Book VI make clear that the ruler, like other highly-placed Aztecs, should spend considerable time in pious and public attention to the misery and transitoriness of the human condition. Through his conventional expressions of humility in prayer, the ruler exemplified mortal personhood before the gods. For instance, Book VI, chapter 12, prescribes that the new ruler, upon his ascension, should recite before assembled dignitaries the following prayer to Tezcatlipoca: Ο master, Ο our lord, Ο lord of the near, of the nigh, Ο night, Ο wind, thou hast inclined thy heart. Perhaps thou hast mistaken me for another, I who am a commoner; I who am a laborer. In excrement, in filth hath my lifetime been—I who am unreliable; I who am of filth, of vice — (Sahagun 1969:41)

Several passages in Book VI instruct the supplicant to weep (choca) when addressing the gods with such prayers, so that they might see his despair and pity him. Thus Montezuma's frequent public weeping cannot be interpreted as evidence of his inner states, and would not have been so interpreted by his contemporaries. This weeping is stereotyped exterior behavior (OS = S), evidence for the pitiable condition of the ruler as an exemplary human person vis- -vis divinities, and mention of it can be motivated by the dominant vantage. Truly differentiating attention to Montezuma's inner states is absent in the early chapters of Book XII. When Spanish ships anchor on the Gulf coast for the second time in three years, Montezuma sends messengers with lavish gifts appropriate to divinities. In this section, the representa-

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tion of Montezuma is shaped by the dominant vantage: the ruler advises his emissaries decisively, in appropriate high language, and rewards them with lordly generosity. But as the traps he laid with spies and sorcerers failed to stop the Spanish advance, Montezuma is said to have become afraid. By chapter six, Montezuma is reported to neither sleep nor eat, nor does anyone speak to him. While Montezuma's public displays of despair are probably conventional, the passages in Book XII that show him at a loss for words are at striking variance with other representations of rulers, who are usually portrayed through their oratory. These representations of the ruler's failure to speak are heavily evaluated. "Evaluation" (Labov—Waletzky 1967; Labov 1972) is that set of elements in a narrative discourse which departs from the minimum requirements of the narrative event sequence. Heavy evaluation is taken by narrative analysts to assert "reportability", departure from default elements of events (Linde 1978). This heavy evaluation can be analyzed in vantage theory as a textual icon of Montezuma's distinct!veness from the lordly ideal. These texts are entailments of the second-level cognition of the recessive vantage, DO = D2, representing Montezuma as exaggeratedly different, as evidenced by his public behavior, from what was expected of the ruler. Analogous to the polarization of the focal color in the recessive vantage of coextensively named categories, this textual elaboration locates Montezuma as far as possible from other rulers in the categorial space assigned to persons. For instance, in chapter 13, we find the following passage: (9)

Auh in öahcico yehhuänün titlantin iuhqui pöhuilihqueh in Moteuczoma in iuh mochiuh in iuh quittahqueh. In Moteuczoma, in ö iuh quicac, zä öhuältöloh zä öhuältölohtimotlälih öhuälquechpiloh öhuälquechpilotimotlälih. Aocmö öhuälnähuat Zan öntlanauhtimotlälih Huehcäuhtica in iuhqui öntlapoloh. (Sahagun 1975: 34)

'And when the messengers arrived Thus they recounted to Montezuma What had happened What they had seen. As for Montezuma, when he heard it, he just bowed his head, just sat, head bowed, He hung his head, sat, head hanging. No longer did he speak out, He sat as if deadly sick, He was delaying, as if thus destroyed.'

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By chapter nine, Montezuma's affective states are the specific focus of considerable elaboration, as shown in example (10). (10)

Imc chiucnähui capltulo: oncän mihtoa in quenin chöcac Moteuczomatzm, ihuän in chöcaqueh mexihcah, in ihcuäc öquimatqueh, ca cencah chicähuacqueh in espanoles: Auh in Moteuczoma cencah tlatenmah, motenmah, momauhtih, mizahuih, quitlatenmachilih in altepetl (Sahagun 1975: 25)

'As for the ninth chapter: There it is told how Montezuma wept, and the Mexicans wept, when they knew that the Spanish were so powerful, And Montezuma intensely prayed weeping in supplication, in awe, in astonishment, he prayed in supplication for the city.'

Bierhorst (1985b: 306) provides a translation which suggests a new understanding of this passage. While Dibble and Anderson translate cenca tlatenmah, motenmah as "loudly expressed distress, he felt distressed", Bierhorst gives tenmati 'to wail or complain, to worship with prayers' (he gives the te- 'human object' prefix with this verb (te-tenmati); here we see the stem with prefixes tla- 'inanimate object' and mo- 'reflexive object). Bierhorst's translation suggests that this passage may represent Montezuma as performing one of the duties of a ruler, weeping supplication of the gods, rather than as experiencing an exclusively personal "distress" suggestive of emotional breakdown. Unusual, however, is the embellished description of affect, realized through three different verbs-motenmah, momauhtih, mizahuih. In stead of tlatenmah, where the inanimate-object prefix tla-, surely locates "prayed weeping" as a public display oriented externally to the supplicant, we find the reflexive mo- in all three of these verbs, suggesting a shift to inside location, to private "feelings" and "motives", not to public display of the pitiable human condition. In comparison to the brief zoom-in to the finest level of concentration in the dominant vantage seen in examples (5) and (6), where only one verb refers to feelings located by the mo- prefix as probably "inside", this description is sustained. Within vantage theory, we can explain this prolonged atten-

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tion: it is possible because the text is organized by entailments of the most preferred level of attention, ID, of the recessive vantage, instead of the least-preferred level, ID, of the dominant vantage (the source of the mentions of feelings in [5] and[6]). Repetition and parallelism like that seen in (9) marks Nahuatl high language, usually deployed in stereotyped locutions of heroism and piety. The rhetorical technique is familiar, but here it is turned to an unusually elaborate representation of inner states. Proliferation of these expressions sharply distinguishes the representation of Montezuma from that of Cuauhtemoc, or, indeed, of any other Aztec ruler who appears in the texts we have examined.26 We turn now to the presentation in Book XII of the relationship between Montezuma and the cosmic forces that determine, in Aztec view, the ruler's destiny. In chapter seven, Montezuma is twice reported to have fainted: when he hears of the Spanish guns, and, in example (11), upon learning about the great Spanish dogs of war. As far as we know, no ruler or other high personage faints in any other Aztec chronicle. When enemies are terrified, conventional high language holds that they "marvel" (mahuizoa), as in (7) above. (11)

Auh in öiuh quicac in Moteuczöma, Cencah momauhtih, iuhquin yölmic, moyöltequipachoh, moyöllohzöman. (Sahagun 1975: 20)

'And when thus Montezuma heard it, he was very frightened, thereupon he fainted, his heart was afflicted, his heart was angered.'

Here the verb "to faint" and the two mo- ("reflexive") prefixed verbs that follow all incorporate the root yöl: they evoke the teyölia, the cosmic force located in the heart. The verb translated "to faint", yöl-mic, literally means "he died in regard to the teyölia". (The reference of the verb miqui need not be to literal death, as is clear from the other compound verbs like a-miqui 'to be thirsty' [literally, 'water-die'].) This affliction might result from sorcery or from excess. Fainting evidenced the weakening of Montezuma's teyölia, and, consequently, of his ties to cosmic order. In the dominant vantage, human beings resemble one another by virtue of sharing of the internal animistic forces (the entailment of the formula SI = S2, at the second level of concentration). A perception that this link is weakened can precipitate a shift to the opposite arrangement, found in the recessive vantage at the second level of concentration, DO = D2). This cognition entails that a person so characterized will exhibit unpre-

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dictable, alien, animal-like behavior. Thus this fainting is highly significant, and will be discussed further below. The representation of Montezuma's feelings as indubitably "inside", distinguishing him from other rulers, is particularly clear in a magnificent passage from chapter nine, seen in (12). Unlike the passage in (10), which might refer to a stereotyped public display of distress appropriate to a ruler, this section is difficult to interpret in any way other than as a representation of extreme distress "felt" by Montezuma in form of unique interior states. Since the rhetorical strategies here are shaped by the preferred level of concentration of the recessive vantage, sustained attention to Montezuma's feelings is possible, realizing the entailments of the cognition ID = D. The passage includes not only remarkable elaboration of verbs representing these feelings, but also unique rhetorical and grammatical devices found nowhere else in Aztec chronicles. These include a shift in register from high language to colloquial language, an unusually rich repertoire of verbal inflections, including a high frequency of a rare, complex, and highly marked verbal aspect, the conditional irrealis, and a shift from direct discourse reported speech to inner speech. Vantage theory provides an interpretation of this dimension of the text: these highly- marked devices are textual icons of polarization of Montezuma as an exemplar of the recessive vantage. (12)

1 Auh in iuh quicaquiya in Moteuczöma 2 in cencah temoloh, 3 in cencah matataco, 4 cencah Ixco tlachiyäznequih in teteoh, 5 iuhquin pätzmiquiya lyollo, 6 yolpatzmiquiya, l cholözquiya, 8 cholöznequiya, 9 mocholtiznequiya, 10 mocholtlzquiya, 11 motlatlzquiya, 12 motlätiznequiya, 13 quinnetlatlzquiya, 14 quinneinäyiliznequiya in teteoh. 15 Auh quimoyollotica,

'And thus when Montezuma heard of the great searching, of the great pursuit, because the "gods" wanted so to look at his face, thereby his heart was tormented, he was tormented in the heart, he'd flee, he would flee, he would get away, he'd get away, he'd hide himself, he would hide himself, he'd try to hide himself, he would try to hide from the "gods". And he'd been thinking,

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16 quimoyölloliäya, 17 quimoplctica, 18 quimoplctiaya, 19 quiyöcoxca, 20 quiyöcoyaya; 21 it moyölnohnötzca, 22 ic moyölnohnötziya, 23 /c quimolhuTca, 24 f/j//c quimolhuiäya, 25 canah öztöc calaqmz. 26 ,4wA cencah mtech moyölläliäya, 27 wfecA Awe/ ca/co z>